Standing before the works of these two artists, one gets the impression of looking into a mirror. Without realizing it, we find ourselves reflected beyond the figures depicted in the paintings. The boy and the “parrot person” within the frame soon become “me,” and also our neighbors—our loved ones. The deeper we immerse ourselves in the works, the more we experience a heightened sensitivity to the resonance that lives in the innermost chambers of the heart.
The boy portrayed by Lee Eun Hwang is a persona through which the artist projects himself, yet he is also a shadow shared by all of us. This is why the Good Job Today series feels like a form of comfort offered to each individual viewer. Sharing an ordinary day with a companion dog, or sinking into tangled thoughts amid walls filled with doodles, the boy becomes a self portrait that reflects our own lives back to us.
Jin Young’s “parrot person” likewise calls to mind a portrait of contemporary individuals who live both apart and together within the crowd. Somewhere in an imagined forest, they play the piano, read books, and savor small bites of coffee and donuts—yet inside the parrot masks, familiar faces from our everyday lives are quietly hidden. In this coexistence of mimicry and individuality, layers of contemporary life are projected and refracted.
Where each of us discovers “me” is something only the viewer can decide. Still, we hope this exhibition, Echoes Within, becomes a time to encounter a familiar self anew—through the eyes of another, amid the many selves we carry. And in the moment when the boundary between the “I” outside the work and the “I/other” (彼我) within it begins to dissolve, we hope you can feel, in that narrow in-between space, the inner echoes returning home.
