“We all have stories. Just as you do. Lots of stories, big and small. They all add up. Over a lifetime it all adds up. That's why we're here, William.”

- Daniel Wallace. Big Fish: A Novel of Mythic Proportionsons (1998)

I recently encountered old photographs from my grandma’s home. Although the pictures were not of good quality, I felt overwhelmed with some feelings as if it were my own life.

We live in a world saturated with images. But it is becoming harder to find an image that truly touches our hearts. After television first opened up a new era of images, social media and smartphones massively increased the volume of images we are exposed to in our everyday lives. We constantly consume fragmented images on social media and take countless pictures everywhere with smartphones. Our world – which is “perpetually accelerating and ever-more interconnected” - also makes images to flow at unprecedented “social-media speed” (borrowed from Peck and Theodore, 2015: xv).

This tendency towards fast consumption, production, and circulation of images leads us to develop a ‘blaisé attitude’ - an emotional detachment from stimuli - towards images. Georg Simmel described in his 1903 essay that people living in modern cities were seemingly indifferent, apathetic, and emotionally detached from their daily environment. He insists that this reaction of indifference and apathy is a ‘protective organ’ developed for individuals so that people are not overwhelmed by unpredictable stimuli inherited in metropolitan life. Nowadays, excessive stimulation of images makes us passively receive, absorb, and embrace them. And our emotions are becoming detached from overwhelming images.

However, a picture is “a very peculiar and paradoxical creature, both concrete and abstract, both a specific individual thing and a symbolic form that embraces a totality (Mitchell, 2005: 12)”. Although we inhabit a world overflowing with meaningless signifiers, we sometimes encounter images - which contain specific personal stories or collective narratives - bringing up strong emotions in certain individuals - and even within communities and society.

Then, how can we use emotions? - and ‘overwhelm’ rather than being overwhelmed by images. We need to ask ourselves what we want to take from the constant flow of images. Everyone has their own frame to view the world. We can choose what to see, what to take, and what to keep. And we can do art  – which is “not just passively receive the things, but subjectively select beautiful elements and move forward¹ (Zoh, 1996: 122-123)”.

Through doing art, our own ‘frame’(s) little by little disrupt, dismantle, and destruct ‘framed’ images. Together, our ‘frame(s) and art(s)’ someday - slowly, but gradually, and powerfully together² (Kim, 2019) - could have “the power to expose and defeat cruel norms³ (Butler, 2024: 36)”. We can use emotions to ‘overwhelm’ images - norms, ideologies, and society that constantly frame ‘what we see’.

My work is an effort to tell my personal stories to others - by overlapping multiple pictures and photographs. I have captured images - which I have confronted throughout my lifetime - that have personal meaning in my life. Most of these images are pictures of people I care about, which I have taken in different places and times. However, I also used images from old photographs, postings from someone else’s social media, and certain objects that have personal significance. By adding up these images containing beautiful personal stories, I extracted the colors and emotions of my memories entangled with specific people and places. 

¹  “그런데 '본다'는 것이란 무엇인가? 본다는 것은 빛의 자극을 받아들이는 것만은 아니다. 본다는 것은 단순한 수용이 아니라, 하나의 적극적인 행위이다. 시각이라는 '집게'를 가지고 집어들이는 것을 뜻한다. (...) 눈에 비친 것을 보기보다는 무엇을 보려고 하는가가 더욱 중요하다. 믿기 어려울 정도로 우리는 형체에 대한 기억이 없다. 퍽 두꺼운 책을 다 읽고도 우리는 그 책의 인쇄활자 종류가 무엇인가 하고 물음받으면 거의 대답하지 못한다. 예술은 대상의 수납(受納)에서 이루어지지 않고, 아름다운 것을 선택하여 '보아 나아가는 것'이라 하겠다.”

조요한.『예술을 사랑하는 마음 (My Love for Art)』 - 아름다움이란 무엇인가? (What is Beauty?). 한길사, 1996, pp.122-123.

² “나는 그 적정선을 ‘십시일반(十匙一飯)하는 타자 및 자기 이해 의식’으로 설정해보고자 한다. 십시일반 의식은 익명으로 구성된 공동체를 보호하고 지탱해줄 수 있는 최소한의 호혜적 교환을 가능케 한다. 사람들은 타자와 불가분의 관계를 맺고 살아가기 때문에 불행한 타자는 내 불행 가능성을 비추는 거울이다. 십시일반은 내 이해를 크게 양보하지 않고도, 자기 이해관계의 훼손 없이, 그리고 현실적으로 자기 형편에 맞게 사회적 안전망을 형성할 수 있는 현실적 대처 방안이기도 하다. 너무 크게 빚졌다고 생각하지 말고, 너무 크게 감사할 필요도 없으며, 너무 큰 죄책감을 가질 필요가 없다. 느슨하지만 견고한 사회연대를 위하여.”

김왕배, 『감정과 사회: 감정의 렌즈를 통해 본 한국 사회 (Emotions and Society: Korean Society through the Lens of Emotion)』, 한울아카데미, 2019. pp.79-80.

³"And yet thinking and imagining have never been more important. What form of critical imagination would be powerful enough to oppose the phantasm? What would it mean to create a form of solidarity and concerted imagining that would have the power to expose and defeat the cruel norms and sadistic trends that travel under the name of anti-gender ideology movement?”

Butler, J., “Who’s afraid of gender?”, Knopf Canada, 2024, p.36.

Reference:

Butler, J., “Who’s afraid of gender?”, Knopf Canda, 2024.

Mitchell, W. T. “What do pictures want?: The lives and loves of images”, The University of Chicago Press, 2005.

Peck, J., Theodore, N. “Fast policy: Experimental Statecraft at the Threshold of Neoliberalism”, University of Minnesota Press, 2015.

Simmel, G. “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903). Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents, edited by Kolocontroni, Vassiliki et al., The University of Chicago Press, 1998.

김왕배, 『감정과 사회: 감정의 렌즈를 통해 본 한국 사회 (Emotions and Society: Korean Society through the Lens of Emotion)』, 한울아카데미, 2019.

조요한. 『(조요한 철학에세이 1)(Yohan Zoh’s Philosophical Essays 1) 예술을 사랑하는 마음 (My Love for Art)』. 한길사, 1996.