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Details

  • Title: Travel Manual
  • Creator: Lim, Sung Soo
  • Creator Lifespan: 1977
  • Creator Nationality: Korean
  • Creator Birth Place: Cheongju, Korea
  • Date Created: 2011
  • Physical Dimensions: w913 x h912 cm
  • Type: Painting
  • Medium: Mixed media
  • Critic's Note: For several years, Sung Soo Lim expressed his distrust of society, uncertainty, unstable situations, and the mentality of suppression and desire using comic characters in the wonderland he created. The small, chubby and child-like characters are shown crooked and disrespectful on his canvas. In the series of broken images, where the characters create pathways from memory to the current place, are situations Lim intended to evaluate. His characters transform themselves in these examples: destruction-becoming, illusion-becoming, dream-becoming, evil/humble-becoming, and soullessness. They are standing on their hands in protest to complacency and stepping into the process of ‘becoming.’ While painting his Monad characters, he becomes a character unlike his original self. He becomes an animal, plant, or molecule. He gets close to the microscopic proximity and describes the world as molecules where the layers of organic systems collapsed. Lim’s Monad is a body of work that was formed while the layered system was wound down and destructed - like diaspora. This body is a unique character combined with an animal, human, plant, time, and place. It appears to attempt an escape from standardized and fixed conceptions. Through his own unique characters he reveals an autistic point of view like vacant space, and creates a floating illusion on his canvas. These intertwined illusions are depicted as a blueprint-like manual that functions as a controller or distracter. Recently, his work moved on from the escape-obsessed image to the more flexible and metaphoric image. For example: A child fishing on top of a giraffe’s head surrounded by clouds; a child looking into a periscope made of a pipe in the house filled with water; a child looking at the world while riding a hot-air balloon; a giraffe eating food in the house; and tiny worlds on the green saw-tooth. The new series shows Lim took a direction to smooth and engage, departing from the aggressive and defiant attitudes that he used to take in order to escape from the complicated real world.
  • Artist's Education: Cheongju University. Korea. B.F.A., Painting

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