Spring: Lee Jisun
Kim Baikgyun / Professor at CAU
For a time, Korean society embraced the idea of 소확행(sohwakhaeng), meaning small but definite happiness that feels achievable. Many people agreed with the idea that a life content with everyday joys might be more meaningful than one bound to painful pursuit of unreachable goals. For most members of society, aside from a few driven by exceptional ambition or good fortune, the world of limited resources contains structural contradictions that cannot be solved no matter how hard one tries. Some modern thinkers traced the suffering produced by these contradictions to a problem of speed.
Baudrillard saw the loss of meaning as the result of political, historical, and cultural realities being accelerated and pulled out of their original contexts into a hyper space. Ivan Illich argued that speed based on excessive energy use weakens human autonomy and deepens social inequality, and stressed the importance of everyday living over abstract ideas of life in 『Energy and Equity』. Shinichi Tsuji likewise proposed slow living, using the body and living with nature, rather than relying on the tools of civilization. For all of them, the fast pace of modern life, which passes by before we can fully sense or understand it, was seen as a key cause of unhappiness.
In a finite world, values tend to favour efficiency. Efficiency and speed form a close parallel, and in an efficient system, speed and accuracy become virtues and the basis of competition. Efficiency is rooted in self-interest, and the idea that self-interest is the source of human suffering has existed since ancient times, across both Eastern and Western thought.
Speed is clearly linked to efficiency, and efficiency goes hand in hand with self-interest. Yet understanding this principle does not immediately restore a healthy or whole way of life. In this sense, Han Byung-chul’s insight is sharp. He argues that the core suffering of modern people does not come from speed itself, but from the loss of meaning’s gravity. Things have drifted away from the ground and from one another, leaving people exposed to what he calls a society of nervous violence. Because speed is relative, the distortion of life cannot be fully explained by whether things move fast or slow. For this reason, “slow life”, proposed as a reaction to a fast world, risks becoming little more than self-consolation or hollow self-justification.
This is where the work of Lee Jisun becomes meaningful. In this exhibition, her work asks fundamental questions: what is value, how do we recognize something as valuable, and do the values we claim to hold truly deserve that status. From there, her work turns to the questions of what a genuine life and practice, grounded in those values, might look like.
In 《The Man in the Museum》 and 《Heritage》, Lee Jisun shows that what we call value is often value in name only. A name is not the thing itself. Yet we have no other way to speak about value except through naming it, so we are forced to turn it into a concept. At that moment, when value is fixed as value, it also dies.
We place objects in museums because we believe they are valuable. But the moment an object enters a museum, it is removed from the time and place where its value was formed. By leaving that context, it loses its original value. What remains is a one-sided, preserved value granted by the new space of the museum. This is what heritage becomes. It looks meaningful and valuable, but in truth it is dry and detached, like a fallen leaf separated from the source of life. There is no longer life in it. No living practice remains.
The true beauty of a fallen leaf comes from long endurance. It grows in spring, withstands wind and rain through summer, and only then takes on its red or yellow colour. What we call heritage is what remains after that process is further filtered and hardened by outside forces. It is what is left behind, not something that is still alive.
So, how should we live? Lee Jisun explores life’s questions through the contrast between cats and dogs. In her work, cats blend into the real world. They are not separated as abstract ideas or isolated images; instead, they merge with their surroundings, existing in a way that you cannot separate them from the world. Since space cannot exist without time, cats live a life fully connected to the world.
Dogs on the other hand, exist clearly as dogs but only in a fictional space within the artwork. This comes from their different traits. Both cats and dogs are domesticated and connected to humans, but dogs are more social, while cats are independent. Dogs adapted to human needs for survival, which ties them to an imagined world. Cats maintain independence even while relating to humans, which makes them autonomous. True, living value is not about abstract ideas or dead concepts; it is less about speed or comparison and more about how life is grounded in the world.
The world of true value, which is expressed through attitude, is only reachable when we move beyond a concept of desirelessness, as shown in 《A child with a baloon》. In a desireless world, no fixed purpose is imposed, so we are not trapped in a distorted world where answers are predetermined by goals. This keeps our thoughts from being separated from life. When the world and I are aligned – when I exist fully within it – I am not confined to any single value.
Life seems like a series of choices. Yet, no matter what choices we make, we often end up with only regret. This happens because our consciousness is separated from the world. If this is true, then there is good reason to look at the world from a perspective of integration.