Survive and Coexist: A Commission Project
By Sun Young Yoo
I rarely use colors in my drawings, and people usually ask me why. I figured there are way too many colors around us, and I refuse to be another noisy artist. In my works, I’m showing my own world with thousands of thin lines — inviting the viewers to fill in the blanks with their own imagination – like playing with a coloring book.
In my drawings Survive and Coexist, my assignment from Red Flag Magazine was to celebrate the beauty of the incredible architects found within the animal kingdom. I wanted to show not only the structural beauty of nature, but also to point out why it is necessary for animals to construct architecture.
In “Survive”, I celebrate the ingenuity of octopi who collect coconut shells and clam shells to use for protection, camouflage and shelter. In “Coexist”, I focus on the underwater metropolis formed by coral reefs. Reefs are like townhouses for sea creatures. They all live peacefully together in community within these intricate, symbiotic “towns”. I wanted to capture a moment in that world.
Animals do not necessarily need homes to protect themselves, survive, and thrive – they are at home in nature and in community. In contrast, we human beings enjoy to “possess” things and still we never seem to accumulate enough. I thought the absence of the concept ‘possession’ in nature makes the architecture created by animals purely beautiful.