We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Yong Eun (May) Kwon. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Yong Eun (May) below.

Yong Eun (May), looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.

The first time I thought I wanted to do art was when I saw animation. Various works by Disney, Pixar, Ghibli and tons of comic books have been my dear friends since childhood. Those pictures and stories allowed me to imagine and dream of a new world outside of reality and enriched my world. The emotion was so touching that I naturally started dreaming of creating my own animation and comic book. That was the beginning of my pursuit of art. After that, I dreamed of becoming an animator or cartoonist for quite some time, but as I studied art and built my own art world, I wanted to focus more on the emotions I felt and wanted to convey them rather than creating such an organized and complete story, so I decided to major in fine art. Nevertheless, my artwork still contains the storytelling and emotion of animation and comics.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

My drawings, paintings, and sculptures are humorous self-portraits of incomplete modern individuals who seek to escape the excessive competition, endless work, complicated thoughts and emotions of their daily lives.

Most of my work features my alter-ego, a half-human half-fish figure that I call Fish Daegari (which is Korean for “fish head”). Fish Daegari doesn’t overthink things. Fish Daegari does not suffer from the worries or pain of modern life. I paint Fish Daegari with bright pink flesh, because it lives in a state of raw freedom.

Fish Daegari almost always has a drink in its hand. I am inspired by the way alcohol represented liberation for citizens during the ancient Dionysus Festival in Greece. The fish head, in my art, is like a mask worn for a Dionysian celebration. For philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, humans possess both Apollonian, reasoned qualities and Dionysian, irrational ones. A vital life requires embracing and keeping a balance between the two, through a Dionysian festival, for example.

I aim to convey humorously, through the juxtaposition of humans and fish, that this irrational, emotional, and venting desire is not negative or hidden but inherently natural. As an artist, my work is driven by the desire for all of us to live more authentic lives, to take more time to find happiness, to see that our lives are short and finite, and that beneath our skins, we’re all just pink meatballs!

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

The best thing about being an artist is that I can take a good look at myself. It is important for all people, even if they are not artists, to explore their inner self, but for good art, artists must be more honest with themselves than anyone else and delve deeper into their inner self. I think this is a great advantage of pursuing my professional job and at the same time enriching my life and finding the meaning of my life. Of course, exploring my inner self is not happy or easy, but it is often painful, but as incomplete humans, we must do it because it is essential to find our own meaning in this world.

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

My goal as an artist is to give people a break for a while. As a person who thinks life is difficult and mainly painful, such brief relaxation, liberation, and rest are what I think is most necessary for myself. I hope that my art will give me and people a little bit of freedom in this complex, difficult, and unpredictable world. I wish for my art to convey the message that for a moment, it’s okay be honest about our desires without feeling oppressed. In this way, I hope to give me and people a hope that one can still find strength to live in such a world. I hope that the rest my works give will not be volatile like today’s mass media or SNS shorts, but deep and true like the sky you suddenly see while busy walking.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.fishdaegari.com/
• Instagram: @fish_daegari