South Korean artist Young-Deok Seo uses bicycle chain links to create beautifully evocative sculptures of human forms and faces. His latest set of faces, produced over the last few years as part of his Meditation series, tower over their surroundings as hollow masks, the large scale amplifying the serene emotions sculpted into each expressive visage. As cold and rigid as the iron chain links are, they portray amazingly realistic features and powerful sentiments when connected by the artist.
“I believe my work is an expression of the restless lives of people living in the times of high-technology civilization,” Seo explains on his website. “I cannot deny that we are living in complicated connections with infinite information in this century. I see the links of chains as the connections between information, which also resemble interchanges in brain circuits. In these countless connections, we are overwhelmed by duty of making decisions. We are in agony because we do not know where to go at the interchange, but we must take an anxious step toward a complex future.”
