HOE — 回 [hoe]
Returning & Circling

Hoe consists of video and paper sculpture. The paper sculpture is made in Korean traditional calligraphy by using traditional ink, brush, and paper, hanji. Chinese character ‘回’, which is written on the sculpture is a character modeled on the meandering flow of water. The character has the meaning of ‘come back’, ‘turn’ and ‘rotate’. In the video, the paper sculpture is made of repeating process of writing a character on a sheet of hanji, covering it with a new sheet, and re-writing over the stack. Father writes first, and then the son follows to write the character. Hanji is so thin, so the character written on the page below is seen though the covering paper, and a person can replicate along with the trace. The characteristic of hanji that allows ink to permeate and spread blurs the shape of the written characters over a stack of paper, and each sheet coagulates into a solid piece.

Hoe was made on the basis of attention to the idiosyncratic culture in contemporary South Korea that underwent colonization, independence, civil war, and rapid development in the last hundred years of modern history. The culture that is emphasizes hierarchy has an indivisible relationship with its historical background.  After the end of the Second World War, South Korea developed rapidly. In the process, South Korean culture had tended to pursue efficiency and demanded that members of society have sameness within the social system. Such a culture contains the risk of being insensitive to individual emotions. Hoe thinks about the structure of repetition, sameness, and totalitarian culture.