9505 SIM_Memory

About the Artist

SIM_Moby expresses 'Purgatory'—a place between heaven and hell, prior to life and death. From the artist's childhood realization of antinatalism that 'giving birth to one life is the same as giving birth to one death,' he explores and establishes 'SIM_Purgatory,' a free alternative space where the laws of life and death do not apply. This idealistic world, characterized as an 'afterlife connected to reality,' borrows concepts from the present world as motifs and is depicted as diverse 2D landscapes, becoming an immaterial space that fuses the artist's past life experiences, East Asian identity, monstrous forms, and imaginary images from past lives. This purgatorial world aspires to a free and eternal utopia without extinction, and for this permanence, after the primary physical work (sketching), it is recorded through secondary work in the digital realm where physical decay is absent. The 2D images, beginning with physical materials and completed digitally, are sometimes delivered directly through displays and sometimes printed on various physical materials to be summoned into the present world. The purgatorial world given materiality provides viewers with an illusion—making it difficult to tell whether the work was originally painted in oils or acrylics, or completed digitally and then printed. To produce this illusion, the artist uniquely transforms the material textures from the primary stage multiple times in the digital realm, a process SIM_Moby calls 'erosion reincarnation in megabytes.' This expression refers to the textures generated through multiple cycles of digital erosion and corrosion, rendered as a technique that creates a distinctive sense of density on the pixel surface. The touch of these digitally eroded surfaces sometimes conveys the noise texture of 1990s VHS screens. Through this, purgatory works pursue the ultimate aesthetic that the 2D digital medium and JPG format can express. These 2D digital images, possessing such characteristics, are printed on various materials but then undergo a process of deconstruction (death), are recombined, and reborn through collage. The high-density purgatorial images, already created through erosion reincarnation, are cut into various shapes, with each fragment expressing the purgatorial flames described in Catholic theology. Before entering heaven, the concept of purifying flames that burn away sins from life exists in purgatorial theology, and the flame-like collage fragments are chaotically intermingled. Viewers in the present world sense the opacity of purgatory that cannot be fully perceived through the visible senses of reality. Works finished with acrylic sticks deliver a distinctive texture formed by the combination of high-density collage fragments, adhesive, and acrylic sticks, once again expressing the texture of erosion reincarnation on a new material surface beyond 2D digital alone. Through these diverse processes and works, SIM_Moby's art explores 'the reincarnation of painting' by repeating cycles of birth (sketch) and death (digitalization), birth again (printing) and death again (collage), in pursuit of the purgatorial worldview.