Where there is a will there is a way
- September 2021, Hamburg
- Watercolor, Pigment, Bronze powder, Colored Pencil on Paper, Brass, Black walnut wood
- 1913 × 3821 × 89 mm
“Why do I exist?” Or “how was the world established?” Such fundamental questions are the greatest theme that human intelligence has always confronted. This magnificent mystery that once religion, philosophy, and now science are trying to answer is the focus of my interest. This area of inquiry has become more and more irresistible at the turning point today where the stratified border between real and virtual fields has begun to fluctuate.
At the core of this work is the German word “Wirbelsäule.” It is a compound word comprised of “Wirbel (Whirl)” and “Säule (Column),” and it means the spine. However, for the work, that shouldn’t be a word like “Spine” or “Backbone” but should be “Wirbelsäule.”
Consider the word “Säule” first. Columns stand vertically. In the long history of vertebrates, only humans act with their spine always upright. Almost every vertebrate moves in the direction of its spine, parallel to the surface of the Earth. But how does that apply to humans? Despite the fact that humans have an upright spine, we are still tied down to the surface of the planet. What does this mean?
The word “Wirbel” is also interesting. In a way, whirls are always swirling above our columns. In our brain, the right and left hemispheres complement each other and function together. Images and languages are deciphered in the two different halves, and they form logical and illogical thoughts in the head. That is just like a spiral of emotion and logic. The nerves extending from the spiral pass through the spine, and they are half twisted to connect with the body. That is, the right brain is connected to the left side of the body, and the left brain is connected to the right side of the body. The will flows from the brain to the body or from the body to the brain via electricity through this half-twisted pathway. Then, if the beginning and the end of the half-twisted pathway are connected, there appears a Mobius strip, the symbol of eternity.
The topics covered in this work are wide-ranging, such as the mechanism of the human body; the history of space, life, humans, and science; the connection between the Earth’s structure and humans; the mystery of prime numbers and golden or silver ratios; the relation between language and existence; the philosophy of immaterialism; and so on. However, what this work represents are not the facts based on such academic knowledge but interpretations of them and a fictional narrative that has been fabricated from these interpretations.
This work, in which multiple elements are intertwined, can be decoded from any component part, and all the elements are closely related. Each element is like one point, and my task as an artist was to connect those points and to generate and present lines, surfaces, and a structure as a narrative because the structure is the world itself that surrounds me, and the narrative is my life story as one human.
It is certain that there is no one-and-only answer to the question “Why do I exist?” Even I may find different answers for myself: If I think about the question when my environment has changed, my perspective of thought will have changed as well. As time passes, I will change, and the answer will naturally change. From time to time and place to place, the answers I can get are always different, and they are all correct. The answer to the mystery of existence is not something that is already present nor a solution that I am able to find somewhere, but things I have to generate by myself. When someone follows the direction of their belief, the trace of the progress will be the way.