The Aesthetics of Structure — Metaphors of Color, Light, and Object
Color is not icon.
Light is not illusion.
Object is not quotation.
None of these elements express emotion.
They sediment structure, distort perception, and reorder cognitive hierarchies.
In this work, emotion is not represented. It is intercepted before it can emerge.
Each formal element is engineered to suppress feeling at the level of perception itself.
Color — Invisible Divisions of Emotion
The five cardinal colors of minhwa visualize a metaphysical order.
I retain that architecture,
but reverse its semiotic direction.
Color is not affective signal but topological cue.
Red does not signify fortune,
but constructs a camouflaged surface of excessive benevolence.
Yellow does not ground the center,
but marks the compressed strata where emotion is silenced.
Color resists surface.
It operates as visual censorship,
interrupting rhythm, dislocating gaze,
regulating what cannot be felt.
Color precedes emotion.
It does not illustrate emotion. It divides it.
Light — The Apparatus of Refusal
Light does not illuminate.
It reveals the boundary of concealment.
In my work, light is not direction but rejection.
It speaks not to what appears,
but to what is permitted not to appear.
If minhwa casts light to sanctify,
I reverse its flow.
It becomes a beam that fails to reach affect.
2025,
from The Ambiguity
of the Perpetrator
Deconstruction
of Form
Object — Engineered Breaches Within Structure
The object is not ornament.
It is an intentional fracture embedded into form.
The dancing woman is not joy.
She is the scene of emotional failure.
Not expression,
but delay.
Not interiority,
but a residue of dislocated performance.
The alien is not the Other.
It is a structural void,
a nonaffective insertion
where the capacity to feel has been redacted.
The sun, constructed as a lens,
is not symbol but metonym of surveillance.
It does not cast warmth,
but reveals the apparatus that monitors emotion itself.
These objects borrow from minhwa’s visual language,
but do not preserve its intent.
They displace function,
invert signification.
Tradition is not interpreted.
It is recoded.
Color severs flow.
Light reassigns ethics.
Object incises form.
None of these reconstruct emotion.
They visualize the mechanisms through which emotion ceases to function.
Each visual component appropriates the decorative semiotics of minhwa, only to expose ruptures engineered precisely to inhibit feeling.