Creation
What makes me who I am?
Creation gives feline form to the many presences within a person and the relationships between them. Entangled beings emerge from a girl’s body, surrounding her and moving around her. Do they belong to her, or is it their gathering that brings her into being?
Creation began with the question: What makes me who I am?
We tend to think of ourselves as a single being, with one body and one name. Yet a person holds many different emotions, memories, desires and experiences—even aspects that contradict one another. SHHAN imagined these invisible things within us as catlike forms.
They are not characters with clearly defined identities. They might be different selves, emotions or memories, or the many personae within a single person. Rather than determining exactly what they are, the work focuses on the idea that countless things intertwine to constitute an ‘I’.
This is where the title Creation begins.
The beings seem to emerge from inside the girl while also wrapping around her body. They may be protecting her, restraining her, or leading her somewhere. There is no clear boundary between the girl and these presences.
Has the girl created them? Or have they come together to create her?
What is being created in Creation is not so much a new creature as the being we call an ‘I’. Perhaps a person does not begin as a complete, unified self, but is continually formed as the countless things accumulated within them intertwine and affect one another.
The artwork Encounter carries this thought into another scene. Something that existed within is no longer an invisible part of the self: it appears before the girl as an immense form. When we encounter outside ourselves something we believed existed within us, it becomes uncertain again whether it is still part of us or a separate being.
Creation does not consider the relationship between human and cat solely as a bond between two external beings. By bringing feline forms into the human interior, it proposes that relationships also exist between the self and the things that constitute it.
Among memories and emotions, experiences and desires, and all our different aspects, perhaps we do not need to choose just one as the true self. All of them may instead be intertwining and colliding, continually making us who we are now.
What makes me who I am?
Through the many forms that inhabit a person and their relationships, Creation approaches the question of being to which SHHAN repeatedly returns.