Byun DaeYong: Dreamer of Ice creams, Fantasies and Global Warming

HOME TO MOVE ICE CREAM
Byun is a visual poet. His works are fairytales and their compositions, purposeful, the soft pastel colour schemes and arguably adorable subject matter seemingly reenacting scenes from a preschool storybook, coming to life in a standstill, a three-dimensional rendition of a cartoon show from a distant childhood.


ICE CREAM AND POLAR BEAR
The dreamlike aesthetics of his craft are punctuated by the anthropomorphized subject matter, performing various human-like tasks and possessing an apparent knowledge of ethics as they support one another, interacting in ways seemingly humane in nature.


THINKING POLAR BEAR
His continuous "animal-human" motif is a hence a metaphor for the picturesque of society, one that can be explored in varying viewpoints; the more innocent “humanisation of animals” or the non-to-subtle expression of “animalization of humanity”. While the former explores animals being forced to adapt to a ‘humanised’ circumstance, the latter deals with the darker issues of the decline of humanity in a society where nature is exceedingly subordinate to an increasingly modernized culture, one that makes us lose track of what essentially differentiates us from wild animals.


GOOD MORNING
Byun hence deals with backdoor themes regarding the waning of social and moral conduct in regards to our natural environment, and simultaneously explores how this ‘lack of humanity’ in turn influences the destruction of our planet and forces our lesser earthly companions into crises exceedingly foreign to them.


COSPLAY 
Through his playful imagery and benevolent oeuvre, Byun gently coaxes us into re-addressing issues of global warming, rapid commercialization and environmental destruction, and reminds us our role as caretakers of our planet.