Reorganization of Exploration - Fetishrama <Fetish+Drama>

Curator Kim, Jae Won

It is unnecessary to go through the +19 adult authentication to see the work of Do, Byung-kyu. Fetish was used as a tool for understanding and exploration of the symbol system presented on the inside of his work, and various figures of the doll displayed on the surface is a drama that stratifies unconscious inner desires of the artist into each story.

The artist Do, Byung-kyu is an image producer and a director that unravels highly concentrated inner stories into many branches at the same time. The artist unravels each part of visual images and displays the work by providing the symbolic meaning of such physical property (doll) as a connection ring (fetish) or by reinterpreting (drama) the childhood memory. On the inside, symbols of various human desires including the natural desires of the artist's childhood come into contact with various languages including the unconscious, implicative and abnormal to express intrinsic desires of human beings through absence of emotion in a cute and lovely doll instead of frustrated expression. Beyond such absence of emotion in the doll, an expression with a different meaning is imagined. The artist works out each of private desires into objective stories to allow views to look at the reality of the doll as a reorganized drama.

The doll is transformed into various shapes, sizes and symbols. As it can be seen from the work titles of <Lovely Face>, <Tear>, <Playmate> and <Lollipop>, natural human desires from the artist's childhood plays and kidult-like imagination of the grown-up artist arouse transformation of the doll. With the doll as the main theme, other dolls related to the main doll are displayed in friendly, multiplex and ambivalent layers of feelings from the glimpse of heterogeneous reality. Identity of the artist himself is observed from the childhood plays of the artist through pictures of a doll, and true ambivalent feelings of human beings can further be mentioned as perjured by the doll. Also, the artist even shows a shape of liquid with sticky and slippery viscosity in order to reveal the ambivalence of human nature. Looking at the work, each doll speaks about different stories but all of them are commonly found to co-exist within that viscous liquid. It is a substitute that connects stories with diverse feelings over the emotionless faces of dolls into one and also a protector for essential human identity and desires. That viscous substance not only connects human feelings to social feelings of the reality to damage the very first feeling but also at the same time protects the essential human identity to maximize the double sided ambivalent feeling. The origin of such double sided ambivalence is direct experiences the artist felt with his skin during childhood when the frog became the target of sadism within human nature, target of cherish for grief, and a social friend in reality. In this part, diverse feelings are incorporated into even more multiplex and complex feelings to create the ambiguous point that the true character of multiplex layer pertains. Such point has fetishistic imagination and aspect of new understanding that create the work like this.

In the latest work, figures of dolls with cute and lovely external appearance are reorganized as a fetishrama <Fetish+Drama> that explores reality and the inner story over reality by reiterating various feelings of human nature based on the artist's childhood and corresponding heterogeneous elements. The reason for appearance of a daily material, doll, instead of using a straight forward way of drawing to emphasize the descriptive side that exists within the inside of the artist is probably because the range of stories delivered over images of dolls is diverse. That is, I am expecting that all lost fetishrama within human nature will be explored, reorganized and reinterpreted by the artist Do, Byung-kyu.