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Silence. In times were everything is framed into a format to problematize reality as kind of market driven neuroticism, I longed to escape into a troubleless, and perfect world, a kind of naive desire for a peaceful beautiful world. I like thinking on how utopia could look like. This project starts with the idea of beauty and the sublime. The influential Chinese landscape painter Guo Xi (c. 1020-1090) who wrote a sentence which felt appositely to our times, "Nobody likes to be hindered by worldly troubles". This sentence was exactly what I felt, even though in our times it feels almost ironical. It feels that we as people misbehaved in heaven, that we were kicked out of heaven to suffer on earth, longing to get back. But we have no clue how.
On the South Korean island of Saryando there is an encounter with an English teacher who tells the legend of Ognyeo, a Korean princess who was sent to the world by her father as a punishment for her sins committed in the celestial world. Both, the phrase of Gou Xi and the Korean mountain legend, are to some extend mildly ironic and naive, which results in an attempt to document, capture and sometimes stage reality. Opposed to what photography does, the images are used to escape from reality, and try to fit in a sense of poetry in our dailyness. |