Heaven and Earth

This work reinterprets a phrase from the Tao Te Ching, “人法地, 地法天, 天法道, 道法自然 (A man emulates the earth, the earth emulates the sky, the sky emulates the Tao, and the Tao emulates itself, Chapter 25.)” Through the reflection of the water, it reveals that the relationship between 天上 (the heaven) and 天下 (the earth), which would seem to have the opposite meaning, are not indeed divided into two, but rather, they are indivisible. As our ancestors paid attention to the shadow of the moon reflected on the water while thinking, the surface of water becomes a place of contemplation when reflecting light. That surface becomes a boundary of the sky and the earth, and it is thus a borderline be­tween this life and the afterlife.
In past years, my work dealt with the mean­ing of translation and the process of recontex­tualization. Through transplanting various forms of texts and images into a new environment, I intended to uncover the paradox, at times, ob­served in our usual way of understanding things. Originally, the English version of the work Heav­en and Earth was created first. The work Heaven and Earth commissioned by a Chinese garden in Chinatown located in Vancouver, Canada is a site specific work, in which the sentence “EARTH, REFLECTS, THE, HEAVENS” is installed upside-down on a pond, flexibly reflecting itself on the water.
Unlike the work Heaven and Earth, where texts are formed horizontally by flexible move­ments, the work 天上天下 (Heaven and Earth) vertically standing becomes a border where the two worlds meet. And the vision, through which this work presents heaven and earth as one uni­ty, is a process of consolidating the spirits of the Seongam reformatory in the history that might still be lingering at the border of the two worlds.
In the process, natural conditions, such as the tides, rain, wind, and so on, also adjust the screen - the water - while constantly changing the form of the reflection.