Lee Yong Deok artist’s writing
2011

Conception in Mind and Truth in Reality

I have long wondered how reality is perceived by the mind.

The real world soaks up time like a sponge, eternally letting the pageant of unique temporal and spatial beauties glide by. It never nestles down; its momentary nest effortlessly disintegrates itself, yielding to the next moment. The Before and the After are consumed by the Present.

Reality is simply indivisible. The processions and the changes in the material world take place locked in the chain of sequences, connections and ramifications that are non-breakable at any arbitrary point of the events; no single moment is, in actuality, a singular, independent happenstance; its continuum is coloured in contingency.

This is the nature of reality, which human perception finds problematic. In order to understand the reality and access to the truth, humans try to delineate boundaries along by boxing them into specific units which are convenient for conceptualizing. In other words, the process of conceptualization is to throw restrictive boundaries onto the perceptually infinite material world, that is, capturing it in the frame of a human-mind-friendly system. The material world flows freely and trespasses over contiguous borders, and yet the human conceptual mind does not have the latitude to do the same. Nonetheless, we nonchalantly live in a state with the two mixing and colliding like seasoned travellers who jump onto the bus of discrepancy and crevasse between the actuality and what is described in the books. Yet, more often than imagined, we encounter a collision between what our mind conceptualize with what is in reality.

I suppose that our living experiences oscillate between what the concept in mind wraps over and what lies under the wrapper – reality. To my understanding, the canonical concern of art is the attempt to approximate the significance in reality, and I intend to create the aesthetic tool to facilitate our mental means to conceive the material world versus the understanding of the fabric of the real world.