Hache Primitive MUN-GI YANG

In the “Sapiens” series, the surface of the stone is transformed into a prehistoric cave wall where men drew food, animals and fish that they wanted to catch while hunting in order to stay alive. These works are presented as documents that allow us to reason by analogy about the beginnings of our civilization. These drawings, more than words, are immediately transmissible and universal.

The desire to catch a bison, a deer or a fish projected on the wall of the cave, refers to our current desire to possess objects and food. By engraving fish and wild animals on my stone bag, I in turn mark this desire to keep myself alive.

It is this human desire that is the original principle of civilization and culture. This will to survive is also found in the form of the stone ax as a survival tool. They accompanied the beginnings of the history of man in the process of his becoming-conqueror on Earth. The stone ax is made of a natural stone, the size of a fist, and a wooden handle. It is both the extension of the body and the extension of intelligence. This is the beginning of sapiens thinking. The handle of the prehistoric stone ax had resulted in facilitating the actions of homo-sapiens.

ARTIST

Mun-Gi Yang was born in 1970 in Gwangju, South Korea. He graduated from Fine Arts at Chosun University.

In 2012, the artist-sculptor presented Story of LUXURY STONE at the Okgwa Museum of Art, South Korea. This exhibition revealed the particular attention he pays to the meaning and symbolism of the luxury bag by exploiting the aesthetic potential of stone. In this exhibition, 45 works proposed to question the nature of the object and the human being and the structure of social mechanisms in the elaboration of contemporary desires. These Luxury stones, although initially appearing as parodic works on Chinese counterfeit bags from major brands such as Louis Vuitton or Chanel, go far beyond a simple imitation or representation of these objects. By the very characteristics of these stone objects, the useful function of the bag disappears. Losing all functionality, the object is now transformed into a symbol-object, an icon.

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