VBV
I’ve been working on this digital art for about four months. The original idea was to show what we conventionally consider beautiful in contrast to something terrifying. Eventually, the idea evolved even further after, early in the morning of February 24, 2022, I found out that Russia had invaded Ukraine. I couldn’t believe the news; my home country had started a full-scale war. This was the country that had sacrificed so many people for world peace during World War II. I felt guilty for not being there, guilty for enjoying my life in a peaceful and beautiful country while elsewhere people were dying for reasons unknown to me. Through this art video, I wanted to share with people the type of guilt I had experienced.
United
After working on the VBV project, I wanted my next project to be bright, simple, and joyful. I had been thinking in this new direction for quite a while. Eventually, while sitting in a college class full of diverse students happily chatting about their lives, I realized something that made me unintentionally smile. We are all people with unique backgrounds, and yet there was no difference between us. Every day, from the news, we hear about how people despise each other for not speaking the same language, not looking the same, or not believing in the same ideas. But here, in my classroom, I didn’t see any of it. We were all united by our passion and goals. This realization inspired me to focus on themes of possible unity and shared humanity in my new project.
S means L
This is the first time I decided to perform myself for this project. Instead of demonstrating a specific modern problem, I wanted to show a universal problem that applies to almost every human being. The idea of my performance is to show human struggles that can be faced at every stage of life. If you focus on the background, you will notice the path that most of us choose to walk on. The video starts with the neighborhood (your home) and ends with a huge corporate building (your job). Of course, our lives don’t end after we find our jobs, but this is where we usually stop moving forward. My video art is inspired by two works: William Pope.L’s The Great White Way and Xandra Ibarra’s La Corrida. The Great White Way inspired me to pick specific locations to add more meaning to my idea. La Corrida inspired me to use the running movement to demonstrate my idea of human struggle.