Ji Won Cha

My practice focuses on re-articulating the sublime in the 21st century. This re-articulation concentrates on what evokes the feeling of sublimity and finds a way to process these complex emotions of uncertainties that hold a place both in our personal lives and in a bigger construction of society.

“The Anxious sublime” is what I have named the topic of my practice. It is a way to capture the intricate emotions that swell up during this elongated moment of anticipation where one hopes for the future to arrive. The “future” that is supposed to happen. With the contemporary world overflowing with excesses of information at a digital hyperspeed, our coping mechanism is degraded, and we lose our ability to differentiate fact from fiction. The information that we access accumulates and forms a massive cloud of data, yet we still cannot find a definite answer. What is destined to occur in this ever-changing world? What is it that we are so eagerly waiting for to happen? The feelings that escalate when we encounter these questions are what I try to portray in my works.

Emphasizing the circumstances of “not knowing” and of “loss of control”, my paintings are dedicated to capturing the contradicting feelings of hope and despair, constantly questioning the existence of “fate”. While my imagery is derived from landscape references, the created sceneries are beyond this world, in a land of fantasy. The painting’s prolific dialogue is dedicated to capturing the co-existence of divergent sentiments with the works finding seduction in darkness, distress in beauty, tranquillity in chaos, and courage in destruction. Using images that represent heightened senses of experiences, my practice details the anticipation for the “future” that is supposed to happen, but which never arrives. These futures collapse into the present and the future always remains out of reach, to be idealized, anticipated, but forever uncertain.