For recent several years, I have been experiencing very strange feelings. One of them is fear. I am very afraid of speaking to a person only to be misunderstood by that person, and listening to someone only to misunderstand the person. It gives a lot of stress when I have to be careful with every word and every sentence to avoid misunderstanding. I feel as if I have been walking on a minefield. Make a slip of the tongue, there begins warfare. Truth becomes irrelevant. Language can destroy the truth, and only enhance the confusion. I often feel that silence is the only solution. Even when I feel like to communicate with other people, I rather keep silent because of the fear of causing another misunderstanding. I do want to associate myself with others with active communication but I end up dissociating myself from others with silence. This is an irony in reality of communication. The fear of misunderstanding others and being misunderstood by others leads one to the dissociation from others.
Language is imperfect. It delivers the minimum clue for communication. From the clue, we can see various kinds of reactions depending on different types of people. What is defined, what is persuaded, and what is discriminated by the language? Language cannot be a standard. It is only a reference material. Human can not only resolve but also lose everything by language. Language makes a passage between people, but it can be a wall. What do we want to listen, what do we listen, what can we listen, what should we listen about and also what do we want to speak, what do we speak out, what can we speak, what should we speak about? Freedom of language is existed, but many of human beings are hurt from language.
I thought I could enhance happiness and peaceful mind through language and communication, but I now feel that human language more often causes a barrier among people. The freedom of human being is rather constrained by the human language. The starting point of my recent sculptures is to raise questions on what the person can do about this problem. What does make walls among the people? The matrimonial purgatory seems to highlight the irony of life. How do we overcome the walls dividing the human minds? I face the wall right in front of me and I am telling to myself that I should overcome it. This is the major concern to be expressed in my sculpture.
Another concern of my work is related with the ego ideal. What is the self and what is an individual person in a gigantic society? One can build up its own world and nurture the illusion that the self-created world is the only world. Imagine a person nestling in a little house on a treetop that has no doors or windows. The person, being disconnected from outside world, may believe that his or her house is the best. By pure accident, however, the person may get out of his or her house, and see that there does exist all kinds of worlds beyond own experience. The person may well feel how large the real world is and how trivial his or her house is. I feel this is another irony of life: something should be built up but should be pulled down for self, ego ideal. Building up? What? How high? Pulling down? Which one? How low.