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SONNI AUN

here I am 11 Mai – 10 Xullo Room Philip West. First Floor

I was born in Seould, South Korea and grew up in different countries. I also had a short stay in Venezuela arriving at the United States at the age of thirteen. I have been in the United States since then.
I intend my pieces to always invoke a sense of narrative because storytelling is one of our most elementary drives, borne out of our instinct to look for meaning in the world. Yet the narrative is always tangled and nearly indecipherable because we always understand the world only imperfectly, through fleeting moments that rise up out of our incomprehension. Underlying it all, is also the constant questioning and examination of our own flesh and identity, grotesque in its ongoing decay and despite that, or because of it, so beautiful at the same time.
I think of the earlier pieces as being more ruminative and meditative studies, with their subdued color scheme and their simple object-on-background presentation. I like to think these strange objects and creatures as being deceptively quiet, with their strangeness held back a little, inviting the viewers to explore their mystery, and that despite (or because of) their inscrutability, they evoke an ineffable sense of emotion. Sometimes we are the most receptive when we are confounded. Perhaps it is apt that so many pieces are called some variation of "untitled" because I wanted them to reflect our inability to classify or apprehend so many different things or phenomena in life, our muteness in the face of all that is impossible to understand.
The later pieces grew more colorful and baroque, more promiscuous. I wanted more extravagance and absurdity, for the pieces to be more operatic, and I made the planes of viewing more disruptive and convoluted. I wanted an implied structure and a kind of system underlying the drawing, a system that is confounding rather than clarifying. I was trying to create the sense of several layers of narrative being told at once, through the interlacing of different visual styles. Although this was already present in the earlier pieces as well, in the later pieces I tried to heighten even more the contrast and the push-and-pull between the different materials, such as the roughness of colored pencil, the looseness of watercolor, and the intricate tightness of ink drawing.
This is because I consider all of my pieces to be visual poems that play with visual language, as traditional poems do with the written language. I am as much interested in the language itself, whether it be written or visual, as I am in the story being told (or not told).
Also, by creating such intricate layers, I wanted the work to reflect some of our existential confusion, what it is like to be in the world today, with so many contradictory and parallel information and sensory stimulation. There are sometimes broken references to the grid, which is a nod to both art history and also to our contemporary life, in which the inorganic material and technology grow symbiotically with things made of flesh � and in which the boundaries between such inorganic and organic material are gradually being broken down. Yet, in my titles for the later pieces, I chose titles that came with a very specific implied emotional scenario, as if they were sentences lifted from the middle of stories. By doing this, I wanted to plunge the viewer /in media res/ into the imagining of an emotional scenario, sometimes drawing their attention with ridiculous specificity in the wording of the title. I wanted all of the loosely churning visual images to be anchored by these texts, and for the texts sometimes to rub against the grain of the images and generate even more absurdity, and at other times, to augment the emotion that is already in the piece to take something that was a trailing wisp of a feeling and make it resonate.
Sonni Aun