Diagramatic Self- Portrait

비몽사몽도(非夢似夢圖)_Detail plan of somnolence(2008)


I've seen the staggering art of Korean artist Minjeong An on a few sites now (50 Watts, colossal...) but I need to share this with you. She uses the complexity of scientific visualizations as an artistic method to great affect. You must imagine the effect of this level of anatomical and science-inspired complexity on a larger-than-our-bodies scale. She is clearly inspired by scientific ideas, as can be seen in "The Power of a Kiss" which explicitly quotes Newton's Second Law of motion or F = ma (force is equal to mass times acceleration), amusingly for her mother's spit when kissing. She writes about how her mother's kiss was able to inspire her to walk to elementary school, but when she was old enough to go on her own, a kiss no longer inspired, but nor did she receive any.



The theme of family also recures in "Detail plan of six membered family:...". The mother's warmth is shown through her "aura" (shown as golden yellow rays), sharing aloe, and also from a more scientific standpoint in the formula for what An calls the "maternal hormone" oxytocin. (Please visit her site to view these images at larger scales).



The 'house plants' light panel explores photosynthesis and the role of human emotion (or so I am able to glean, with some uncertainty and aid from google translate).



The view of her self-portrait in progress makes me imagine she inhabits a fascinating word of complex sensority inputs, as if she's trying to get all of reality (from the nanoscale to human-scale) onto the page.