I was born in Jeongsan, which is located deep in the foot of Chilgap Mountain. Spending my childhood in an unfrequented mountain village, I had to walk more than 5 kilometers to and from school every day. My childhood was filled with the sound of grass bugs that resonated under the galaxy in the night sky. When I was in 8th grade, my family moved to Seoul. What first grabbed my attention was the crowded landscape wherever I went. During my college years, I visited the park along the Han River every day, and I found the bustling crowd interesting enough to be the subject of my work. On warm holidays, the parks flooded with thousands of people, and in the summer, tens of thousands crammed into outdoor swimming pools. In the mid-2000s, five-day workweek policy was put into force, attracting even more flocks to vacation spots. Whenever I went skiing, or to the mountain and the beach, what I considered the most impressive was the crowd. I began to think about how to effectively portray such spectacular scenes. In order to express the vast landscape that could not be captured at a glance, I started by organizing small flocks of people on large canvases, further developing the work by employing bird’s-eye view and panoramic view. I attempted to portray with as much detail as possible the happy moments of people with their families, lovers, and friends. However, when I turned my gaze from the images of individuals to the crowd filling up the screen, it was telling a different story. The essence of leisure consisting of personal tastes and choices is mutated into something mass-produced, popularized, and standardized. This ironic outcome challenged me with new ideas on autonomy and existence of modern people. Individual memories become public events, and further grow into a pattern which appears similar across all regions, cultures, and ethnic groups. For instance, the work “In Summer (2013)” blends various summer beach scenes not only in Korea but also in many other countries including Thailand, the United States, France, Italy, and New Zealand. Few steps back, my work may look like “all-over painting”, an approach to painting in which the screen is filled with alike colors and forms. This technique appeared with the Abstract Expressionism, and features relatively uniform surfaces. My work assumes the feature of figurative painting, but I consider that the aspects of all-over painting well communicate my view of the crowds of modern society. The tightly packed screen seems to expand out of the frame, and in the absence of a main character or a background, the similar looking figures seem to represent our mediocre life. Lastly, it demonstrates my belief that the individuals enjoying the happiest moment of leisure with their beloved ones all share an equal weight, no matter who they are and where they are from.