‘Image( )–Image( )’ Series – Confronting the Unfamiliar Monster Within
 
“One night at the age of thirteen, beneath the moonlight seeping through the crack of a rooftop window, I encountered an unfamiliar fear. The overwhelming presence that pressed down upon me was none other than the ‘shadow of my own toes.’”
 
This episode represents the “dual aura” that formed the foundation of the artist’s work at the time. Within a single object, its tangible existence inevitably coexists with a counterbalancing energy positioned at its polar opposite. Just as a stronger light produces a more grotesque shadow, the essence of being is completed only when opposing concepts are integrated. The ‘Image( )–Image( )’ series projects images—deconstructed and distorted in all directions through mirrors—into space.
 
The unnaturally elongated movement of hair within the frame stimulates archetypal fears latent in the depths of the viewer’s psyche. At the moment when the familiar image of the “self” transforms into an unfamiliar “monster,” we are finally confronted with the concealed truths of our inner being.
 
Image( )–Image( )2, 2000, Variable installation using two mirrors and two projectors.

This work was presented in 2000 at the exhibition《Media Art 21》held at the Sejong Center for the Performing Arts.
— The Fantasy of Blonde Hair, and the Grotesque Self-Portrait Concealed Behind It
“Is what you are seeing reality, or a distortion born of desire?”
 
In 2000, Park Jung Hyuk summoned the “twisted desires” within us through two projectors and mirrors. Two gazes cascade upon a mirror leaning against the wall.

One captures the movement of a Western woman with blonde hair; the other records the movement of a Korean woman who has dyed her hair blonde in imitation.

Passing through the distorting apparatus of the mirror, these two images collapse their boundaries and intermingle, reborn as a gigantic and grotesque figure. The repeated nodding and shaking of the head no longer appear as gestures of communication, but rather as the futile convulsions of beings that have lost their essence.
 
Image( )–Image( )2 poses a question: What is the substance of that peculiar discomfort that arises when one attempts to appropriate the aura of the other? Whom are we truly confronting within the mirror?