SHIN GUE HANG

Bull

Bull began with the question of what it means that I study abroad in Japan. It was not simply an extension of academic training, but a process of asking who I am within that space and time, and toward what I am sculpting.

The place of Japan, the act of studying there, were not merely personal choices for me, but a field of perception that touched history.

I followed the traces of Korean artists who crossed into Japan during the colonial period. Even in forced circumstances, they continued to work and think in order to preserve or recover their identities. I am not directly connected to them. Yet I walk the same ground, work with the same materials, and hold the same questions. On that parallel line of sensation, I feel that I stand alongside them. Bull was born at that point of convergence.

Bull is not simply an animal form. It is an attitude toward life, a response to history, and a shape that carries the weight of my own existence.

I live in a paradoxical world. I recognize myself as the subject of creation, while simultaneously existing as a part of what I create. These two roles do not clash but interact, shaping both my identity and the world together within the medium of sculpture.

For me, materiality is sensation. Touch and sight are the most primal forms of perception, and the boundary between existence and non-existence is constructed through sensation and learning. Just as objects, plants, and animals each possess distinct vitality, all materiality holds its own inherent life force. While studying in Japan, I internalized the concept of 'animated matter (八百万の神)," and have since believed in the life force of materials. Among them, bronze had the most profound presence. The sculptures born through casting approached me not merely as objects, but as living beings in their own right. In that moment, I found myself in the position of a god within the sculptural world. Just as God created humans close to gods, I was creating beings close to the divine.

But this creation is not achieved through absolute control alone. Bronze casting is my primary method. Casting is not simply a technique, but a complex act where material, nature, time, and chance intersect. The process is both physical and intricate, and it demands delicate intuition and insight. I shape clay, apply wax, build a mold in plaster, and move through the temperatures of fire and water to complete each piece. Although everything passes through my hands, the forces of nature gravity, heat, buoyancy, bubbles, drying time always slip into the gaps and rewrite the sculpture. Wrinkles, protrusions, fissures, and fragments are born this way. As I make the sculpture, the sculpture remakes me.

Sculpture is the site where my reason and senses, will and chance, control and imperfection intersect. Through the act of creation, I test the possibilities and limits of my existence. The works are always imperfect, but it is within imperfection that human sensation comes alive. The precariously rising forms, the sharp protrusions that could cut skin, the shapes that exist within the tension of weight and balance these are the evidence of my perception touching the world, and the record that I once existed. I carry out the act of creation through sculpture, but within it I never achieve absolute control. Humans are not gods. We only borrow the role of the divine for a moment, imitating creation, and through that process we attempt to understand both ourselves and the world. In the end, I am merely a laborer working with borrowed divine power. Humans are imperfect.