CHAOS
How do different cultures and memories meet within a single world?
《CHAOS》 mixes SHHAN’s personal memories with images of popular culture from different eras in a single world, exploring how previously unrelated beings form new relationships. In 2022, the original was transformed into the video 《Metaverse》, drawing the metaverse—then exaggerated as a space of the future—and expectations for new technology into this world of chaos.
CHAOS, 2021
《CHAOS》 is a digital drawing that mixes SHHAN’s memories of games, animation, and films loved since childhood with beings created in his own practice within a single image.
The artist drew images from different stories and eras one by one, building the scene by layering them. Rather than constructing a fixed universe or a complete narrative, he focused on the confused state that emerges as images remaining in his memory collide and connect. Instead of revealing only the finished result, he also shared the ongoing process on Instagram at the time.
Against a giant moon and a city submerged in mist, beings from different worlds appear simultaneously. Colossal creatures, robots, buildings, and symbols do not originally belong to the same story, yet within 《CHAOS》 they share a single time and space without explanation.
Two crowned black cats sit in the foreground. One watches the city; the other gazes out at the viewer. Unreal events seem to unfold continuously around them, yet the cats remain largely unmoved. To them, chaos is less a disaster to resolve than the everyday condition of the world they already observe.
What matters in 《CHAOS》 is not identifying the sources of its images. It is the process through which memories of games, animation, and films encountered at different times, alongside images from SHHAN’s own works, leave their original stories and enter into relationships with one another.
Things that exist in different times and worlds in reality can arise simultaneously in one person’s memory. A scene from an animation seen long ago, a recently created character, childhood memories, and present tastes connect in the mind without clear boundaries. 《CHAOS》 allows this structure of memory to exist within a single image.
Metaverse, 2022
In 2022, SHHAN returned to the completed 《CHAOS》 as the subject of a new work.
As the NFT and Web3 markets grew rapidly and Facebook changed its company name to Meta, “the metaverse” spread beyond the name of a technology to describe the future space in which people would live. SHHAN saw expectations around the metaverse swelling faster than actual change. Adding movement and new images to 《CHAOS》, he transformed it into the video work 《Metaverse》.
Images of a new era enter the existing chaos. The word facebook changes into Meta, while ROBLOX appears like a billboard in the city. A Mimic Shhans character arrives in the DeLorean from 《Back to the Future》. Images that presented visions of the future and imaginary worlds in different eras, including Goku and Shenron from 《Dragon Ball》, mix together in one space once again.
The cat seated in the original’s foreground now wears a VR headset. On its exterior, greetings meaning “hello” alternate and repeat in several languages.
The scene recalls the initial setup screen that appears when a new digital device or service is launched. A device is switched on, a language is chosen, a welcome appears, and a new world is entered for the first time.
But in 《Metaverse》, this “first time” keeps repeating.
Every new platform announces the beginning of a new world; every new technology announces the arrival of the future again. Everything is introduced as a beginning entirely unlike what came before, yet users repeatedly find themselves standing at a similar entrance.
The DeLorean and 《Dragon Ball》, Roblox and Meta, VR and Mimic Shhans come from different eras and worlds. By deliberately making them coexist in one image, 《Metaverse》 suggests that the future we accept as new may be another form of the imagined futures we have repeated since the past.
《Metaverse》 does not satirize virtual reality or metaverse technology itself. SHHAN examines the expectations and exaggerations through which each new technology is packaged and consumed as the beginning of an entirely unprecedented world.
While 《CHAOS》 brought memories and imaginings from different eras into collision within one world, 《Metaverse》 reopens that completed world to add the new desires and images of the future produced by the year 2022.
Everything may appear to be happening for the first time, yet perhaps we keep repeating similar “first times.”
《Metaverse》 was created as a derivative video work of 《CHAOS》 embodying these ideas and was released as an NFT.