Ju Sun Kim (HL)

Curatorial Rationale

During the beginning of the Visual Arts HL course, our teacher threw us a question and along with it a possible theme for our artworks. I wanted to choose a theme that binds all of my artwork and something that truly represented me. I wanted my artworks to illustrate my internal struggles and my friends, and express how cheerful and funny we are, although we may not appear that way. In my Korean culture, adults or elderly individuals always ask us what do you want to be in the future. I answered this question really unhesitantly when I was younger, but now I have doubts, and I rather would like to reply I can't see anything in this long dark tunnel. I feel like fascination and excitement for the upcoming trips, and unexpected weekends are the only events my friends and I are excited about. From this, I derived my theme of 'Teenagers and Our Youth' which represented my concerns explicitly.

Many of the artworks involve multiple uses of bright colors because I believe that colors are symbols that can’t be expressed through words, especially in my culture. Every country represents its people, land, and their government through specific colors on their flag. To illustrate, the Philippine flag consists of blue, red, white and yellow. The horizontal blue stripe symbolizes peace, while the red symbolizes valor. In a similar manner, I decided to use a variety of colors that represented my emotion, situation, and environment.

I hope that the artworks presented in the exhibition will bring out a sense of sympathy or a reaction in agreement with my works; the wanting of freedom, the anxiety of the unknown future, and the ambition to succeed. The artworks are exhibited in a way that when the audience comes inside they go around in a circle looking at each artwork, and each of those will trigger something inside them because I’m sure everyone can relate to the issues I illustrated through my artworks.

The works will be arranged from the artwork with the least amount of color variance to the most variant. This also shows the journey of the last months of my high school career and hopefully delivers this feeling to the audience. My artworks each addresses one part or a portion of a high school student’s everyday struggle, desires, and ambitions. Not everyone will agree to my projected ideas but if one ever had their wildest dreams, then we probably could relate.

This was inspired by the works of Jackson Pollock and Henry Matisse. Their abstract use of variant colors inspired the abstractness of my works. I found their abstract artworks really fascinating because I sometimes got to psychologically analyze what was going on in their mind when they made it. Some people have mental instability which led to the curation of beautiful timeless artworks, such as Edward Munch.

The artworks presented in this exhibition have a meaning behind and it would be interesting for the audience to guess the meaning of each shape, color, and objects in the artwork. The ultimate goal I want to achieve through my work is to publicize that our moments in life will never come back. The time we spend wasting and doing nothing can be turned into something. Our youth is not someone else’s and it doesn’t have to be. If we are clever enough to live each moment to the fullest and to the max, then we can satisfy both our academics and our desire for entertainment. As some people say pain is what makes youth.