Our lives are now surrounded by artificial intelligence. Cleaning robots, AI speakers, self-driving cars, and even Alpha Go has beat the world champion. The android named, “Sophia” can talk to people as if she is a human being and responds to people’s emotions. But it is said that no matter how capable AIs will become, they will never come close to humans, as people’s thoughts and actions are mainly guided by our vast reserves of subconscious experiences. Indeed, our decision making processes are deeply influenced by our subconscious feelings and emotions.
We often hear that in the cutting edge AI research, scientists are looking into the field of the human subconscious. Likewise, I also wanted to discover what lies underneath my conscious mind, as I thought there must be a key to liberate myself from the dark feelings like sorrow, emptiness and sense of desertion that rankled me since my childhood. I also imagined that the best way of doing this was to put myself in nature.
When I wander around the wilderness, I can set myself free from the somber mood that has deeply overshadowed my life. I have discovered myself gradually, eliciting mundane meanings from natural objects, like land, rocks and water, to reconstruct new visual meanings springing out from my own subconscious. Probably this process is similar to what Surrealists used to do, going beyond the ordinary concept of things and transcending the dominance of reasoning. For Surrealists, this method was necessary to access subconscious content.
For me, subconscious content includes complicated and mixed feelings toward my parents, a dominating father and an excessively submissive mother who always had to surrender herself to him. I came to realize that the feelings I denied myself from expressing in words were sentiments I suppressed to my subconscious, because I thought these were too negative to utter. To search for my true identity, I am faced with the challenge of uncovering my past experiences, which I still unconsciously reject articulating, though they somehow make their way into my photographic work.
