Artist Statement

This “Multicultural Poetry Video based on Korean Culture” includes two positive effects: i) audience can explore both the beauty of Korean language and literature via new media, and ii) audience’s emotion can be touched via one of the most touching Korean poems. In recent years, the “Korean Wave” made young people in the world to learn Korean language. For this reason, the number of people who are interested in learning Korean is increasing. The Korean language, called Hangul, is considered one of the most scientific alphabetical systems in the world. It is formed by the combination of 14 consonants and 10 vowels. Reading Korean literature is one of the most effective ways to explore Hangul. For this, I selected a beautiful Korean poem “Flower” by Chun-soo Kim. To observe a semantic effect, I created petal-shaped Hangul font. The proposed art work displays all Korean fonts scattered all around the multi-layered screen. At each time, some of Korean fonts will be randomly highlighted. However, these ramdom highlight of the Korean alphabet is not completely random, but they compose the Korean poem “Flower” in the timely manner. The interactiveness of the system will facilitate and motivate the audience to learn Korean.

• Hyojin Jang, Texas A&M University, USA