Zodiac

Zodiac is a series that paints the twelve signs of the zodiac as animation characters gathered around the sun god Helios. It began with Helios in 2017, led to the 3.3 × 3.3 m Zodiac in 2019, and has since been varied in several forms. It occurred to me that joining the stars of the night sky into figures and attaching myths to them may have been humanity's first drawing. The universe has immense depth, and precisely because of that depth it looks flat. Stars too far apart ever to touch are joined by lines and laid on a plane. Where Western painting spent centuries building depth through perspective, the constellations do the reverse: they turn depth into a plane. That felt close to comics, pictures on a flat surface made of lines. After my exhibition in New York in 2016, I wanted to paint a large picture with more figures. In ancient celestial charts and mosaics, the sun god Helios sits at the center with the twelve signs arranged around him. I thought it would be fun to take that arrangement as it is and paint it in an animation style. I recalled the scene in Masami Kurumada's manga Saint Seiya (1986–1990) where the warriors wearing the Cloths of the twelve zodiac houses assemble in a single panel, the group shots of the warriors in Naoko Takeuchi's Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon (1991–1997), and the characters of Bandai Namco's game The Idolmaster (2005–) standing together. Those scenes, too, must ultimately come from the ancient imagination that looked at the stars and drew gods and monsters. At the center of the picture Helios stands facing front, hands on her hips, wearing a gold crown that radiates from her head like sunlight, with light drawn in fine gold lines spreading behind her. It is the pose of a warrior from Saint Seiya or Sailor Moon. The twelve signs circle around her, each in a figure and costume that carries its own symbol. The garments are drawn close to Greek dress, with flowing cloth and gold ornament, and the skin and hair colors draw on the many types of bishōjo. The deep navy ground is outer space, scattered with stars of many colors and small zodiac symbols. I wanted each figure to have its own pose and color while the whole stayed in balance around the sun god. If Torso and Danae were images of explosion, I wanted Zodiac to look harmonious, balanced, relatively still, and affirmative. Zodiac (2019, oil on canvas, 330 × 330 cm) was shown in Inside of Light (UARTSPACE, Seoul, 2019). It is made of nine 1.1 m square canvases joined together. A mobile that reproduces Helios's eyes in mirror-polished stainless steel, Inside of Light (2019, mirror-polished stainless steel, 160 × 160 × 200 cm), was shown in the same exhibition. Helios (2017, oil on canvas, 193 × 130 cm) is the first work of the series. It inverts perspective: the distant Helios is painted larger and becomes the background, while the nearer figure is small. This was followed by the Zodiac innerspace series (2018, acrylic on canvas), each of the twelve signs painted on a shaped canvas, and Light-left and Light-right (2018, acrylic and gold on canvas, 26 × 30 cm each), triangular canvases painted gold with only Helios's eyes drawn on them. The title innerspace comes from the moment in a bishōjo transformation scene when the figure turns transparent and the background shows through: the figure remains only as line, and a glittering background fills it. These works were first shown in the two-person exhibition Sub-frame (LEE EUGEAN GALLERY, Seoul, 2018). Zodiac has continued in other forms since. The Zodiac drawing series (2019, oil on canvas), painted like drawings in white and black alone; the Zodiac profile series (2021, 2022, oil on canvas, 53 × 45 cm each), portraits of the faces of the twelve signs; Wrath of Helios (2020, 2022, oil on canvas, 60 × 73 cm); and SD Zodiac and SD Constellation (2022, oil on canvas), which borrow the SD (super deformed) style of manga and anime, in which characters are redrawn two heads tall. They were shown in ZODIAC (Gallery Joyana, Marseille, 2022) and SD ZODIAC (EDIT HANNAM, Seoul, 2022). Working on the small pieces sometimes gives rise to the idea for a larger work, and what comes out of a large work sometimes becomes a small one again. Rather than one being the center, all of it together is one Zodiac.