#01

 

Human skin cells die from 30,000 to 40,000 per hour. Intestinal cells change once every 2-3 days. Lung cells change every 2-3 weeks. Red blood cells change every 4 months and hepatocytes in every 5 months. Through this process, it takes almost 1 year for our body cells to change one 100 percent. So, if the existence of myself equals the existence of my body, I am no longer myself from a year ago. Even at this moment, you read this text, your body which you think you are fully occupying is constantly changing. If so, how can you insist that where, how, and what form you exist in? Patterned DNA has been inherited for tens of thousands of years.

 

Patterned religious icons are full of symbols.

Patterned habitual habits that have been embodied throughout life.

Face patterns that can open our private mobile phone.

The YouTube algorithm patterns our search history to catch your taste.

Patterned big data: Artificial Intelligence and etc,

Perhaps, we may exist as a pattern, not as weight and material.

If that's true, I'm curious.

What pattern do you exist in?

What is your pattern?

 

#02

 

Biological humans have digested time through the process of memory in the brain and interaction. However, as memorization has been increasingly transferred to outside of the body due to technological advances, the way humans digest time can also escape from biological forms. Furthermore, Individuals can reproduce and spread their own symbols more easily than ever before in on/off-line passively or actively. From this point of view, Ahn attempts to understand the definition of human existence in the contemporary as a phenomenon or pattern that has the potential to be expressed through an immateriality rather than a biological body. To provoke the issue about how we exist in contemporary, Ahn tried to live as non-physical and he produced his own pattern with the sense of smell that is most closely related to human long-term memory. my scent is a perfume made out of mixing essential oils extracted from Ahn's actual body and various fragrances. He formulated his individuality using the subjective olfactory language and objective biotechnological pattern and planned the performance to share his essence with others in the dispensers installation, wear me. Through the performance of flowing his patterns outside from the exhibition hall, he tried to remind the concepts of ‘liquified self’ and ‘fluid self’. In take off, reaching beyond the effects of a simple recording, the performance video on the fragrance production process stimulates a strange sensation in the viewers through the foreign action of scraping the human body with tools to cause friction and collect their scents.

 

#03    

 

What matters is the act of making a formula.

Regardless of the past or the future,

Physical or conceptual,

subjective or objective,

true or false,

The very moment the being is formulated, It can be light.

And it can be duplicated, can spread, liquified, and flow on time and place.

 

quoted from Artist's Memo

 

#04

 

“ ... But is heaviness truly deplorable and lightness splendid? The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. [...] The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life’s most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness? ”

 

The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera, 1984

 

 

 

 

 

* This artwork was created by the support of ZERO1NE, Hyundai Motors, and the technical support of Dr. Hwan-Myung Lee Lab in the Cosmetic Biotechnology Department, Ho-Seo Univ.

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