Just Kang Gary

Someone asked him, "What's the three main element in making music?"

He answered, "Feel~ Soul~ My life~"

peace
vixklen

Fine Art Photography

A few days ago, the online community gave me a pleasant surprise on my deviant-art gallery. One of my works was chosen as the “Daily deviation” in the category of Horror/Macabre Photography. From what I understood from deviant-art FAQ, “Daily deviation” was kind of a form of recognition from the deviant-art staff community to a few particular artworks of quality which deserved a wider recognition and appreciation from the greater audience. I happened to upload my photography work during my exchange to Seoul National University to deviant-art and one of the pictures from the sequence was chosen. The quote given by the staff read as follows:

“The wonderful abstract macabre photo, Social mockery by ~vixklen, is reminiscent of ones worst feelings of rejection and discrimination. As if you were nothing more than a ghost among them...” ( Featured by `Reaper-X )

The funny thing was that I never thought that THAT particular picture would be of significant interest to the viewer. I always thought that the last picture of the series would be the one that gave the highest impact to the viewer. But, I guess this is what make ‘art’ interesting – the interpretation of a work is something boundless and highly imaginative process. The majority of the comments that I received from the community due to my overnight-fame was that the objects in my photograph seems to resemble ‘penguins’ mocking the viewers. Honestly, until today, I still can’t see any penguins in that photograph.

My work titled “Psychopath” was a photography assignment that I received when I took a fine-art photography class in Seoul National University. The assignment was to produce photographs of certain artistic value. Every week, lectures given were mostly about the works of famous (if not legendary) photographers such as Henri-Cartier Bresson, Duane Michals, Diane Arbus etc with the objective to spark certain inspiration and idea in our heads. I was particularly fascinated with the work of Duane Michals on horror-themed photographic sequences. The horror value combined with photographic elements made the works so beautiful and impactful as well as scary. A particular work that I was very fond of was named “The Bogeyman”.

It all began when I was deciding on which topic should my assignment adopt. I started the conceptualization by asking “What does I really want the audience to see?”. I found this question terribly hard to answer even after a prolonged time of contemplation and visualization attempts. A few days after that, I realized that it was easier for me to visualize what I dislike rather than things that I like. Thus, I began to explore the fearful side of mine. I began with my near-phobia trait of mine towards horror-themed movies and I realized that I have a very low tolerance towards murder-based stories in which the murderer may have developed a certain mental instability. This realization led me to the university library researching about particular antisocial personality disorder named ‘psychopathy’.

In the next few days, I surrounded myself with psychology journals and published medical records of a few patients available at the library which was relevant to this topic. I have to say that some of these records were pretty ‘graphic’ to read. One story that I remembered was about this son and his rich father who would supply him with excessive wealth which led to the personality disorder in his son’s mind. After gathering a few stories and trying to understand the mental disorder, I managed to come up with a certain ‘story’ on how one would develop this personality disorder due to his/her social environment.

The most interesting fact that I learned about ‘psychopathy’ is that these guys are the most talented humans who are capable of hiding their true nature in front of the society. They are often hold top positions in their career due to their exquisite ability to convince others to believe that they are indeed ‘normal’. They are reported to have a very strong charisma and often, one may have fallen to this ‘disorder’ without even realizing it at the first place. They always have ‘motives’ behind their self-made ‘personality mask’ and this may be either positive or negative traits. Hollywood portrayal of psychopathy often correlate psychopathy towards ruthless murderers and this is actually an exaggerated portrayal of such mental disorder – an extreme case, if I may add. On other hand, true motives of a person with such disorder may be positive and may not fit well in the immediate society, resulting in the personality disorder.

It is interesting to note that ‘psychopathy’ is NOT equivalent to ‘double personality disorder’. “Double personality disorder” is a personality disorder where one would assume dual and distinctive personalities subconsciously. In psychopathy, one would consciously plant the ‘seed’ of his/her second personality inside him/her which he/she will use when he/she is in contact with external society to hide the true motives/obsessions that he/she may have.

peace
vixklen