The <Affliction> series originates from my experience of drawing archipelago-style paintings while participating in a project to restore traditional Buddhist paintings. In traditional Buddhist art, various figures such as Buddha, Bodhisattva, and the Four Heavenly Kings are expressed in a certain format. Buddha's physical characteristics are standardized and symbolically expressed in 32 different types, and other types of figures also appear in similar forms in most paintings. Additionally, the number, shape, location arrangement, and color of the characters are almost identical.

Although I fundamentally recognize the importance of the cultural and historical meaning of tradition, the typical representation and arrangement of human figures in religious paintings where rules and laws are emphasized feel like entrenched stereotypes to me. Buddhist philosophy basically assumes that the meaning and value of all phenomena in the world are not fixed. By reinterpreting this Buddhist metaphysical discourse in a modern context, I aim to look at the limitations of fixed perception of ideas through my work.

In the work <Affliction>, an unconventional formative method was used to convey Buddhist values, represented by diversity and possibility of change, in the language of contemporary art, and unlike the coloring method of traditional Buddhist art, stone color was used to express it. The object, in which stone flows and hardens in an irregular shape, represents the fact that any symbol can never exist in a single state on its own. Nothing can exist independently, and everything interacts with other things to determine its meaning and existence. In the end, the work is not clearly determined or fixed and unchanging, but is a process of examining the source of agony through constantly changing forms of change. <Affliction> is a series of 108 works that seek to express Buddhist performativity by including it in artistic practice.