“NYC” Copyright 1997-2007
This is a collage I made long time ago.
It was my “homework assignment” for project mayhem, oops, First rule of fight club, you do not talk about it! Second rule of fight club, YOU DO NOT TALK ABOUT IT!!!
Well, it was one of homework assignment to get in to an art school in NYC. I showed this art work to the interviewer, only response I thought I got from him was that he seemed very amazed how those pieces were cut-out and glued together nicely…he even did try to feel/peel the edges of the cut-out pieces with his pinky finger nails. I said, please don’t even try. It took me crazy amount of time of meditation to finish this art work.
Well, well, well, Ooooh, well(John Lennon song), what I wanted to express but I couldn’t is my idea behind this work. I still clearly remember when I first saw Manhattan skyline in a cab. I just got off from an airplane at La Gardia in early morning, summer of 1996. It was my first visit to NYC!!! The skyline was not clear, it was smoggy. It was not beautiful at all, but something unexplainable made me so excited, it was a giant space ship landed on earth. And WTC was her main bridge, control towers. So, I wanted to embed the excitement into my work. Back then, people over middle east were fighting around Gaza strip and the fight was heating up quite well. I bought at least 10 newspapers in all different languages. It was so easy, I just went around few blocks from my apartment, dropped by every single deli, found all those papers. Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, French, Polish, Hebrew, some languages I don’t even know… It was all around my old neighborhood, 14th St. and 3rd Ave, in east village!!! The papers is the people who live on the space ship. World Trade Center is Money. The Village Voice had a front page, “Emigrants go home!” with a face of Ms. Liberty with black eye. Who punched her? Anyway, I picked Hebrew for one tower and Arabic for another to express my concern over the fight in middle east. Then all other languages for all over the place. I printed image of bills on the voice cover. Cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, glued glued glued…
When I showed this work, I didn’t have no idea if WTC would be demolished in such a crazy way. Even after I watched “Fight Club” still I didn’t have no slight idea of what had been brewing in some people’s mind. Then, the morning, I didn’t even think the main bridge was going down. I even thought the damage was not serious, they could fix in few months. I was very upset whoever did that horrible thing to the space ship I love so much. I love her so much that I chose to live on the ship. I still won’t give up believing in Love & Peace!!!
