hong seung tae
by presenting humans transforming into animals the artist hong seung tae poses the question whether humans are superior to animals and through his work he emphasizes the sickness caused by human sense of superiority and elitism.
"I accidentally came to watch a video on the internet in which
animals were skinned for fur and it shocked me. the animals were still
alive when being skinned, struggling for their lives and this I want to
show the public. I want to visualize this shocking truth inflicted on
the animals by humans, a fact overlooked by most people. my work shows
animals substituted by human forms because I want the message to be
direct so people cannot talk around it. in my opinion a realistic
execution has a bigger impact. I'm hoping that through my work the
public escapes the delusion that any living creature could be sacrificed
for human interests. in general my work is about the preciousness of
life. it was a immense shock to observe the human-animal relationship
from a different point of view and see the balancing on ambiguous lines.
such things as animal experiments or factory farms are examples of this
relationship that most people don't even realize. from the human point
of view we may seem grand or superior, but from another point of view
humans begin as some kind of animals." (artist statement)
