Between heaven and hell,
a space before life and death

SIM_Moby's practice does not begin with a style but with a question about existence itself. In childhood, the artist arrived at an antinatalist intuition — that “to give birth to one life is to give birth to one death.” If birth and death are bound together by the same providence, then is there a place where that providence does not reach?

That question became a space. SIM_Moby names it SIM_Purgatory : 연옥— drawing on the Catholic notion of Purgatory, the realm between heaven and hell, the place before life and death. It is not an escape from reality but a “reality-linked afterlife”: built from motifs borrowed from this world, fused with the artist's lived experience, an Eastern identity, monstrous forms, and images imagined from past lives. The aim is a utopia without extinction — an eternity that does not perish.

The texture of a SIM_Moby work is a deliberate illusion. A first pass is made with physical materials — a sketch — then recorded and transformed in the digital realm. The finished 2D image is delivered to a display, or printed onto a physical surface and summoned back into this world. Standing before it, you cannot tell whether you are looking at oil and acrylic paint or a digital print. That uncertainty is the point.

SIM_Moby calls the repeated digital conversion of that initial material texture the “megabyte erosion of reincarnation.” Each pass through the digital adds erosion and corrosion — a peculiar density that settles on the pixel, carrying the grain of 1990s VHS noise. The image is not cleaned; it is weathered. Matter passes through the machine and comes back changed, the way a memory is changed each time it is recalled.

The cycle does not end with the print. The printed image is dismantled again — a death — and recombined into collage, reborn. The fragments are not arranged neatly; they are composed as chaos, and in that chaos they become the flame of Catholic Purgatory: the purifying fire that burns away the sins committed in life. A finish of acrylic stick closes the surface.

Birth, then death, then birth, then death. Sketch (birth), digitization (death), print (birth), collage (death) — the sequence loops. SIM_Moby calls it the reincarnation of painting. The work is never finished in a single state; it is always passing through one more cycle of making and unmaking, just as a soul in Purgatory passes through fire on the way to somewhere else.

SIM_Moby joins this campaign not as a subject of its cause but as a fellow artist in solidarity — so that those navigating financial exclusion today might find a way through.