YiYi,Jeong-Eun

There, Forest in the Sunset_202054

2020

The reason why I sense liveliness in nature is because the appearance and movement of each object in nature change every moment. My senses that detect such change open up when I encounter (face) nature, and those senses are expanded to the maximum or activated to feel both the visible and the invisible. When I am surrounded by nature on all sides, such objects gather in one space (location) to demonstrate the changes of each moment as well as each of their unique temporality. My body, which wishes to feel a lot of things, will automatically open up all sensory doors to nature without putting in effort. The objects in nature were probably never in the same condition, energy or image from birth to demise. I am like that as well. A book that appears to look the same as yesterday is actually changing over time even when no visible force is applied from the outside (moving or tearing the book, etc.). A book cannot be the same as when it was first made because dust accumulates and the sun shines over it. The change is just slower and less visible compared to when the tree was a natural object. Many things that dwell in the natural environment regularly retain marks across the body due to elements of the daily weather including sunlight, air, moisture, wind and climate. These marks are either large and recognizable or fine and unnoticeable. It can be a mark left immediately by a natural disaster or a slow mark left by gentle breeze or light. At any rate, you cannot get around being influenced. As such, both moving animals and immobile plants accumulate the passage of time on the body or exterior, changing slowly or noticeably even as we speak. Among nature, objects that are easy for me to slowly observe include trees, forests, lakes, rivers and oceans. Also, nature is an object and location that allows me to most keenly sense the fact that I am one of the changing things. While I am a human being, nature helps me realize that I am also a living animal. Since I love nature as a place that lets me appreciate myself as a being that is completely alive, away from the society where I must live as a human, my desire to articulate that property of nature grows stronger by the day. realize that I too am alive when I watch clouds sail across the sky each hour or look at the willow tree that blows in the wind or observe the sprout grow into grass, revealing its figure one leaf after another. Perhaps I am more used to seeing the change in others than seeing the change in myself. The exquisite moment when their “aliveness” and my “aliveness” meet amidst their change. by YiYi,Jeong-Eun