옷의 형상을 활용한 존재론적 표현과 감각적 표현의 비교고찰

Abstract

When adopted as an artistic instrument, a clothing item is transformed into an expressional object unfolding a narrative or poetic meaning thanremaining functional. To comprehend such transitions, this paper looksinto existential and sensuous expressions using clothing in visual art. Through a process of comparative analysis on how differently the same object can be applied in binary oppositions, the paper aims to acknowledge their distinctive aspects such as metaphorical meaning versus a conceptual one, signifieversus significant, and a world captured in thinking versus one captured in imagination. The former accompanies the existential and the latter does the sensuous. The selected examples in existential artworks are of physical pain, conventional restriction related to beauty, sensational uplift through pleasure, birth to death of being, and anonymity of social being. In sensuous artworks, they are of transformation through exaggerated size, simplification, deconstruction, transitions through combining deconstruction and reconstruction, and enlargement with repetition in scale. Clothing form in existential expression becomes a medium in thinking process, and a substitute to human form, which lead the viewer to ponder into human conditions in compound contexts. In sensuous expression, it gets separated from the representational context to become a physical sign newly created through abstraction in the imaginative aspect. Without being interrupted by distinguishable notions related to human affair, clothing simply remains as a sculptural form after its function is erased along with its original form transformed in a sensuous manner. Thinking and imagining are both processes of the human mind. A thought world provides an aesthetic experience of existential insights in the horizon of the real, while an abstract world presents a sensuous experience through geometric or organic compositions in the imaginary. Based upon these comprehended idiosyncratic qualities, the paper is expected to serve as preceding research that provokes a potentiality of diverse expressions using clothing, which can be placed in the threshold of those two styles.