Heaven Lake

200 x 140 cm, 2022, Acrylic on canvas

Cheonji (Heaven Lake) portrays the caldera lake at the peak of Paektu Mountain, the northernmost and highest mountain in Korea. The Cheonji caldera lake resembles freshly drawn water(Jeonghansu), symbolic of a sacred offering in its purest form, in which Korean people instil their spirit to pray for their wishes. Despite being a South Korean, I cannot go to the North; Cheonji is a work of my imagination of the unknown world, painted with a longing for the forbidden place that is a result of a divided country. I aimed to maximally express all the discordances and disparities we can imagine in our world through the Cheonji lake, which we can only see via the media.