This study aims to visually explore and integrate the opposing concepts of life and death within artistic practice. An obsessive anxiety over the finiteness of time leads to a contemplation of life and death, which is visualized as an attempt to expan...
This study aims to visually explore and integrate the opposing concepts of life and death within artistic practice. An obsessive anxiety over the finiteness of time leads to a contemplation of life and death, which is visualized as an attempt to expand the temporality of life through art. The central material of this work is the vegetable—an everyday object of consumption—which, once absorbed into the human body as nourishment, functions as a symbolic medium that dissolves the boundary between beings. This moment, in which the distinction between the human and a seemingly insignificant life form collapses, suggests a fundamental equality and interconnectedness among all living entities. All life exists within a cyclical flow of consumption and transformation, where life begets life. Through this process, the artist combines vegetables with human organs and linear elements of natural landscapes to construct abstract forms that expand the concept of life into the domain of death. These visual expressions are further connected to images of cells, the human body, and the cosmos, implying that life is not finite, but continuously sustained through change. This study reveals that such visual language resonates with the Eastern philosophical concepts of I-so-gwan-dae(viewing the great through the small) and Man-mul-je-dong(the equality of all things), and proceeds to analyze the content, abstract forms, and color palette of the work accordingly. Ultimately, the study proposes a perspective in which life and death are understood not as separations but as part of a continuous organic flow.