The unknown approaches us as something transcendent, imbued with both fear and awe. Something so sublime and beautiful can be observed and measured through psychological observation, as its changes and movements become perceptible. It is about capturing the moment of a vast explosion – the compression and expansion of particles occurring simultaneously on both the macroscopic and microscopic scales.
Love Letter is an observed standing figure that projects this cosmic transcendence into physical space, while Heavy Dots traces the expansion of the surface surrounding the essence of such uncertainty and its transforming trajectories, functioning as a kind of diagram.
Love Letter is both one of the artist’s earliest digital “net-art” works and the title of a work he has held onto for the longest time. Sharing its title with the Love Letter created in 2001, this work consists of two metal pillars rotating in relation to one another. They resemble a fragment of a vertically continuous circular tower. Their movements meet while maintaining a minute distance between them. The impersonal metal surfaces become each other’s halves, forming an empty circle. The rotating pillars continuously generate an empty circumference.
It has been said that uniform motion does not trigger our sensory perception. Detecting the orbital speed of 30 kilometers per second, for example, is supposedly of no benefit to human survival. Yet the artist chooses the most uniform movement possible. He achieves, in the simplest way, something worth looking at for an extended period of time. Come to think of it, celestial bodies in rotational motion have always taken spherical forms. Perhaps the force operating between relationships is what continually causes their edges to slip.
The artist often speaks about celestial bodies – describing this as, essentially, the last remaining subject of his obsessive interest. There is both fascination and fear in the empty infinite and in the laws governing a world that expands endlessly. The meaningless space that repeatedly undergoes creation and extinction confirms absolute isolation.
This inward process can also be found in Heavy Dots. It exists as continuous lines, overlapping surfaces, and distant repetitions. Successive layers extend from the center outward into soft curves. Dense masses press against one another as they expand. Beginning with the motif of the galaxy, which can be understood as a factory of events, this isolated system produces visual events of disturbance and collapse before the viewer.
Love Letter and Heavy Dots, as well as the experience of encountering them, share a sense of emptiness. The edge of emptiness. It is there that the surface resides. Maintaining a balance between order and fragmentation operating around the circumference of the void requires considerable force.
The surface exists between the interior and exterior, but it is not a completely hardened or rigid framework. It continues to move, driven by an ongoing desire for something. Thus, our perception of the surface of an object appears as a particular moment within a cyclical structure in which creation and extinction, contraction and expansion, ascent and descent continually circulate.
The surface mediates the processes through which not only a machine and the “self,” but also countless objects unrelated to the self, connect with and separate from one another. It forms a membrane between objects and ourselves, while simultaneously transforming into something new. Such connections through membranes suggest that everything constituting our world exists on a horizontal plane.
Through a neutral and horizontal attitude that loosens what has become rigid and tightens what has become slack, the artist invites us into a period of contemplation. He encourages us to move beyond a singular, fixed world and to recognize, through a broad and horizontal perspective, the diverse layers of existence – including the “self” – that function as parts of a larger whole.
