The blurry world seen with the naked eye
I usually wear glasses because my eyesight is a little weak. Without glasses, the world looks just a little bit blurry. Depending on the situation, glasses are essential when I want to see clearly or when the other person thinks I will be able to see clearly. There is a balance that is just right for people to live. Even people with “good eyesight” may have a hard time seeing clearly what is 10 kilometers away. The reason most of these people do not carry telescopes is not because they do not need to see that far, but rather because many of them do not see. If everyone else can't see, they don't care if they have to correct their vision. They are not inconvenienced by not being able to see things that they would have to use a telescope to see.
When we try to perceive the world, the way we see the world changes considerably depending on the angle from which we view it, using whatever knowledge and experience we have. If we see the world the way the majority sees it, is that perception correct? And when we say that something is right, on what basis and with what criteria can we say that it is right? As a child, I sometimes thought my perception was slightly different from others. I thought I was leaning just a little bit. This created a tiny bit of a complex and made me just a little bit self-conscious. However, I eventually realized that the very idea of wanting to be like everyone else was wrong. As an adult, I came to realize that everyone hides their slight leanings very well. Some people I met didn't show it at all. Others showed it just a little. Still, they were correcting the tilt with some kind of correction. I guess they thought it was unbalanced if it was tilted.
As a preface, the world appears to me to be tilted just a little bit. To be precise, I am tilted, but I also once made glasses to see the world without a tilt, so I can compare the world with a tilt and the world without a tilt. Personally speaking, I feel most comfortable and most balanced when I am tilted only 15 degrees to the right. I try to show this comfort in my work, but it is impossible for me to show the totality of the world in one work, just as it is impossible to see everything in the world at once. So I create a work of art by tilting a zero degree object just a little bit. The resulting works are made of common materials, and each may look like a mere idea, but according to my rule, they are all tilted just 15 degrees to the right.
The fact that I can recognize that they are tilted 15 degrees to the right is in itself a state of “being corrected” and “wearing glasses”. If the common perception is 0 degrees, we can say that everyone wears glasses of various degrees and adjusts them to 0 degrees. In a sense, the state of 0 degrees can be replaced by the term “blindly believing common sense. However, I would like to expose not the blindly believed “common sense itself” but the “common perception that thinks it is well-balanced,” which is one level below it. By doing so, I believe that the strangeness of this real world, which is the only given world we have to live in, may be back-illuminated.
January 2003