In middle and high school, gaming was my only escape from a frustrating reality. I think it was because they made me forget that I was going through a tunnel that I didn't know when it would end. Looking back, I don't know why I felt so pressured and frustrated, but I remember going to sleep every night and thinking, "What if I ended my life?" I don't know if anyone goes through that. I don't know if everyone goes through that, but it was a very painful time for me. I had sleep paralysis every night, having nightmares, and using alcohol to help me get through the day.

Then I started playing online games. And I became addicted. In hindsight, I think it was the sense of accomplishment in a short amount of time. But the initial satisfaction of easy character progression was short-lived, and I found myself spending more and more time and doing the simple repetitive act of playing. This is the only way to get good items and improve my character. In a world where you can expect and experience tangible results from certain settings, the sense of accomplishment and satisfaction that comes from repeating the same patterns disconnects players from reality. In addition, the system of competition also traps players in the online world. If you spend five or ten minutes less, it's very visible that you're falling further and further behind in that world. As a result, I was trapped in the online world, doing repetitive labor that was detached from reality.

The emotions I feel while working are similar to this experience. When you put in a certain amount of time, the expected outcome is clear and predictable. Also, the repetitive behavior of a set pattern is immediately visible, like earning items. And while the resulting image can be said to be from the real world, it is also a window into a virtual world that is not real. I'm creating another little world in the middle of a big, scary world and playing in it.

People ask me if there's a Taoist or spiritual aspect to my work. but they don't ask people who are into games if they're doing it for spirituality or composition. They are often referred to as wastrels, people who have lost their sense of reality and are immersed in the system of the virtual world, and they are seen as something to be rescued. However, players experience satisfaction in the online space that they cannot experience in real life, and they live in that world.

For me, the act of doing work is like playing a game. It's an addiction to a world away from reality where I set certain rules and move towards a vaguely expected outcome.

By observing her emotions, Park Mira seeks to discover and record where they come from and what factors have shaped them. Although she considers emotions to be a highly personal and subjective domain, she is interested in how they can be viewed and interpreted within the context of society. Mira Park's work attempts to make connections between space and space, story and story, conscious and unconscious, virtual and real, and is presented through drawing animation, installation, and painting. Using black and white drawings as her main medium, she has been exploring narrative structures that occur simultaneously on the screen.

Continuing to experiment with theatrical structures, the artist assumes the concept of the "fourth wall," an imaginary wall that separates the real world from the virtual world on stage, on the surface of her works, and attempts to move various icons that exist on the screen out of the screen and into a new space and story.

This exhibition Frog's Eyes presents the results of my work on drawing animation. It is a record of my research on 'movement' by going back to the beginning and stopping my self-censorship of general movement and naturalness. I focus on the sensations that are expressed from unfamiliar movements rather than the realization of natural movements.

*The Frog's Eye

Some vertebrates including frogs see only moving objects. Whether they truly perceive only moving objects is a matter of further research, but it is assumed because frogs do not try to eat a dead fly in front of them. This is probably because the cells in the frog's retina that recognize insects only respond to ‘movement’.