Zodiac

Zodiac is a series that paints the twelve signs of the zodiac as anime characters gathered around the sun god Helios, here painted as a girl. It began with Helios in 2017, grew into the large 330 × 330 cm Zodiac in 2019, and has since been varied in many 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, yet 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. In that, they felt close to comics, pictures on a flat surface made of lines. Ancient celestial charts and mosaics often show the sun god Helios 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 anime style. What came to mind were the scene in Masami Kurumada's manga Saint Seiya (1986–1990) where warriors wearing the Cloths of the twelve zodiac houses gather 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. Her hands rest on her hips, she wears a gold crown that radiates like sunlight, and light drawn in fine gold lines spreads out 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. On the deep navy ground that stands for outer space, I painted emblems of starlight in many colors, large and small. Each figure has its own pose and color, but the whole holds its balance around the sun god. If Torso and Danae were images of explosion, I wanted Zodiac to read as an image both varied and harmonious. Zodiac (2019, oil on canvas, 9 panels, 330 × 330 cm overall) is made of nine 110 cm square canvases joined together. It was first shown in Inside of Light (UARTSPACE, Seoul, 2019), where the mirror-polished stainless steel mobile Inside of Light (2019, 160 × 160 × 200 cm), which renders Helios's eyes, also hung. Helios (2017, oil on canvas, 193 × 130 cm) is the first work of the series. The distant Helios is painted larger and becomes the background, while the nearer figure is painted small, as if perspective had been turned inside out. Much as manga shows a character's feelings as a large image layered behind them, Helios herself becomes the background and envelops the picture. It was followed by the Zodiac innerspace series (2018, acrylic on canvas), each of the twelve signs on its own shaped canvas. 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. 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, were made at the same time. 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; and Wrath of Helios (2020, 2022, oil on canvas, 60 × 73 cm). These works were shown in ZODIAC (Gallery Joyana, Marseille, 2022). In 2022 the series also branched into SD Zodiac, borrowing the SD (super deformed) style of manga and anime, in which characters are redrawn two heads tall. 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. The image that began with a single Helios grew into a large painting gathering all twelve signs, then divided again into drawings, faces, and small SD characters. None of them is the center: just as a constellation joins distant stars with lines into a single figure, the large and small works connect with one another to form one Zodiac.