I went to an exhibition called “I want to be a rich person without having a job (? ?? ??? ???? in Korean)” in Gangnam with Lexi and Emily. The theme of the exhibition was the mind of the people who are exhausted by their work. When I first went into the exhibition, the first artwork that caught my eyes was a big picture of a subway view in a weekday morning. When I saw this artwork, I thought “Oh, this is totally my taste of artwork”. I LOVE traveling somewhere alone by taking the subway. I don’t mean that I like traveling, I just love that I can see many different people and feel the atmosphere of the subway. Because of that, since I was a very little elementary school kid, I just took a subway every weekend and just stayed there for few hours to feel the mood and see different people. When I stared at this artwork, it felt like I went back in time when I went to the subway every week.
One question popped into my mind. What kind of view of subway does the artist have and what message is he/she trying to give? Contrast to my view of the subway, it seemed like the artist has a negative and dark view of the subway. Since I never thought of subway as an exhausting, boring, and dark place, it was very interesting to see how this artist is trying to show people who are tired and sad in the subway. Also, even though there was no information like who the artist is, what is the intention of drawing the artwork, or what was he trying to show or tell by the artwork, I could see what the artist trying to show; emptiness in heart of the people who are going to work by the subway. To make this mood in the artwork, the artist did not use many different colors, but he used only black and white for the inside part of the subway. Also, he used a few blur colors in the background to give depressed mood and sketchy lines to show emptiness in the artwork.
After deeply thinking about this artwork, I looked back of my drawings and I realized that most of my drawings are not about a place, they are only about a character, mostly a cute boy or a girl. I always thought my ideas for drawing is lacking, but I did not think of drawing of my favorite places rather than drawing only one character in the sketchbook. It gave me an idea that I should start drawing some images of places. But rather than drawing the subway in a negative view, I want to draw the subway with a positive mood because I have a lot of happy childhood memory about the subway.
By looking at this artwork, I had a chance to look back of my drawings and realized that I have to move on from the character-focused drawings. Also, I realized that how an artist draw a drawing can greatly affect a person who looks at the artwork. After looking at all of the artworks in the exhibition, including the subway one, had negative mood and looked like they are complaining about their lives. I affected me a lot, and as I thought about the artworks from that exhibition, it made me depressed and complain for how tough my life is. This taught me that I should always make artworks that would give positive effect on people who look at my artworks.
I do not mean that I should always draw happy and positive things, I mean that even when I’m drawing an artwork with a dark and sad theme, I do not want to make people depressed, but be encouraged by my drawings.
