English / 한국어
Apart from the work for music industry for which he is mostly known, he has also been creating more autonomous work, often taking banal text bits from headlines, campaign slogans and silly jokes, and rendering them in a style strongly reminiscent of the lettering from the 1960s and 1970s Korean popular culture. Rather than a nostalgic retro, however, his work echoes the anxiety and frustration of today’s youth in the visual language borrowed from the recent past—the times when, as it may seem now, the idea of life as something makable and improvable could be held more plausibly. Thus, in its oblique way, his work responds to the future, or the present difficulty of imagining it.
The essence of a joke lies in the space suddenly opened up by an unexpected utterance, in an unexpected time and place and situation. Then, a joke “produced” without spontaneity in a situation where the joke is clearly expected, is not exactly a joke anymore. If not a joke “taken out of its context and put on the wall,” then one embedded in the context, or the context as a joke, A Way of Making Jokes explores the complex mechanisms by which things are said to amuse others.
Courtesy: the artist
