Crowned
What does a being marked by desire reveal, and what does it conceal?
Crowned explores how we perceive and judge a being through the crown as a shared sign of desire and the differing attitudes of its body.
Every being carries the same sign: a crown. Although the crown directly evokes power, possession, superiority and desire, the faces beneath it reveal little definite emotion. Wide eyes and expressionless faces contrast with the crown’s strong associations, creating a distance between an externally assigned symbol and an inner state.
In this series, SHHAN focused on bodily posture and attitude rather than changes in facial expression. Sitting still, lying low, curling up or stretching out, the figures share the same face and crown yet create entirely different impressions. Because the face does not explain their emotions, viewers naturally infer their state from the body’s direction and weight, its gaze and movement.
The crown is less a device identifying a greedy being than a sign that intervenes in how viewers read the image. On seeing it, viewers attribute power, desire or vanity to the figure, but the being neither confirms nor denies these qualities. What it wants, or whether it desires anything at all, remains unclear. Through this gap, Crowned reveals how readily an outward sign can determine judgments about a being.
The bodies, simplified into black, are equally important. With detailed fur and expressions removed, leaving eyes, silhouette, posture and crown, each animal becomes both a particular individual and a symbolic figure. Different species share black bodies and crowns, forming a collective portrait of shared desires and attitudes rather than emphasizing individual identities.
The beings in Crowned are closer to figures made to reflect human desire and attitudes than fixed characters with distinct names and narratives. Yet their ability to develop different personalities through posture and silhouette alone, despite shared starting conditions, became an enduring concern in SHHAN’s later work.
This experiment, beginning with the single symbol of a crown, expanded in SHHANart into beings with more varied postures, actions and personalities. Crowned is thus among SHHAN’s early works to approach animal figures as beings through which to observe human emotion, desire and individual attitudes, beyond their role as characters.
The 50 works in Crowned were created and released as an NFT collection in 2021. The record of the complete series is currently available on OpenSea.
Crowned Symbol GIFs
Click a symbol to download its GIF.
