Shin Jaedon

Shin Jaedon (Korean)

Born in South Korea in 1959, Shin Jaedon came to Australia in 2007, after graduating from RMIT University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts has spent his time between Seoul and Melbourne presenting regular exhibitions in both cities.

Eros In The Pandemic Nights

During the harsh lockdown in Melbourne, every night I watched numerous operas via online streaming service. Mostly they were melodramas about love, desire, betrayal, revenge, death, and so forth. Interestingly, watching them helped me not only to get out of the strong sense of isolation, but also to have opportunities to think deeply about ‘the self’ (myself) and ‘the other’ (non-self), and the relationship between them.

In the daytime hours, I worked on a series of paintings which became about Eros and love as an active principle for the artist and even to philosophers when creating work. Without Eros artwork can be dry and hollow. While listening to Opera I saw how much it contained about human nature and how much of human nature is based on instinct and a search for love, sometimes in other people, in objects of mystery, or in the act of creation itself. I imagined a perfect erotic, noble and flawless love manifested in different forms. The object of love is the eternal Other I can never reach.

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