Seo Young Deok
Anguish 303, 2018
Artwork Brief Description
Deok’s *Anguish 303* depicts a figure cowering in distress, composed entirely of welded chains. The material symbolizes both strength and confinement, reflecting the struggles of modern existence. The faceless form invites viewers to project their own emotions onto the piece.
We are interlocked and running like parts of a giant machine. Just like its components, we hang in there day after day as a gray man living in the periphery. And we are not allowed to be a protagonist of our own very life. The chains in my work are fetters. The fetters are all about our contemporaries’ complicated, forced relationships and cravings for materials. I want to show, through my works, the portraits of our time where personal thoughts and lives are ignored. We are shutting our eyes, ears, and mouth and suppressing our feelings. We are doing this convinced that there is no place where we can express our feelings and take comfort.
To those who are enduring in silence... I hope my works can console you, even if a small amount.
— Seo Young Deok
Seo Young Deok (South Korean b.1983) Anguish 303, 2018
There is a powerful sense of emotion that reverberates throughout Seo Young Deok’s “Anguish 303”. The crouching figure buries its head in its arms, and despite being firmly fixed to the ground, it is imbued with a sense of dynamism and energy. Whilst we do not know the cause of anguish, Deok has depicted a moment of extreme distress and the suffering of his character is palpable. It could be grief, heartbreak, sorrow or any form of emotional pain that compels the body to cower in misery.
The entire body of Deok’s sculpture is composed of chains taken from old bicycles and industrial machinery. He welds the pieces together, mirroring the dynamic system of interconnectivity that is present in humans in our DNA. He chooses to use a strong material such as iron because it is reflective of the strength and resilience of the human spirit. Not only this but the chains represent both the symbol of man’s technological and mechanical advances while also representing the cause of confinement.
He describes his practice below,
“The chains in my work are fetters. The fetters are all about our contemporaries’ complicated, forced relationships and cravings for materials. I want to show, through my works, the portraits of our time where personal thoughts and lives are ignored.”
Deok’s depiction of raw universal human emotion invites us to look beyond the physicality of the chains that the sculpture is composed of and see an element of our own experience in the sculpture. The absence of a face allows us to project our own ideas and experiences onto the sculpture and to strengthen the familiarity we feel with the character in their moment of acute pain.
Numbers are often found in the titles of Deok’s sculptures, and rather than denoting the year, or edition they pertain to the length of material used in the sculpture. For he disjoints every link of a-few-hundred-metre chain and fixes it to another, recording how many is used for each piece. In this work, 303 have been used. Deok completes this repetitive, somewhat tireless task of connecting the links together in a state of zen-like meditation. Only when the process is finished, and the sculpture is complete will he truly relax and find ultimate peace of mind.