Convergence
Where do different worlds become one?
《Convergence》 gathers beings and symbols from different eras, cultures, and personal memories into one space to construct a new world. Images originally belonging to different contexts enter into relationships within a single scene, producing a landscape that belongs to no one world.
《Convergence》 is a digital drawing that gathers beings, places, cultural images, and personal memories from different worlds into one immense space. Originally made under the title 《CHAOS II》, it was later redefined as a work separate from 《CHAOS》.
While 《CHAOS》 approaches the confusion generated by mixing different memories and images, 《Convergence》 approaches the new world that emerges once those images gather in one place. Things originating in different times and stories leave their original contexts, occupy the same space, and form new relationships through their scale, position, gaze, and distance.
Realistic architectural structures, enormous mechanical forms, humans and animals, images from popular culture, and the cats recurring in SHHAN’s practice coexist in the image. No single story originally connects these elements. Yet the moment they occupy one image, viewers naturally imagine why they are in the same place and how they relate.
Differences in scale do not follow the order of reality. Some beings are larger than buildings; others are small beneath them. Relationships of size and distance that could not coexist in reality become naturally accepted within one image, revealing a space formed by overlapping worlds rather than a specific real location.
The beings standing at the bottom of the image face this immense landscape. Before them, images from different places, times, and stories unfold as if they were one world. Viewers observe the scene from a similar position. Rather than distinguishing reality from fiction, they discover new connections between images already gathered together.
In 《Convergence》, SHHAN is less concerned with explaining where each image comes from than with how new relationships and meanings emerge when unrelated things are placed together. Popular-culture memories accumulated since childhood, present interests, and beings created in his practice are not entirely separate within one person’s memory. Images experienced at different times overlap and connect to generate new imaginings.
In this sense, the title Convergence means more than a gathering of images. It names the moment when memories and cultures, reality and fiction, arriving from different directions meet at a single point and form a world that did not exist before.
《Convergence》 does not explain a complete fictional universe. It is closer to a scene showing what can newly emerge when the boundaries between different worlds disappear. Each image retains its origins while forming relationships with other images, gaining meanings different from those it had before.