<Evening, Loneliness.>

Kwan Oh Jun_<Evening, Loneliness.>_165x110cm_Oil on canvas_2022.

In the hall where the sunset flows in, a performer wearing a mask plays the piano far away.

The chair in front of me is empty, and a lamp that I can’t know who or what it is illuminationg is lit.

The feeling of sitting alone and listening to the sound of the piano while watching the sunset is, in a word, lonely.

Freud believed that when mourning for a lost object fails, sadness becomes fixed and abnormal emotional state becomes melancholy.

When no one is by our side, and have to listen to a beautiful sunset and watch a beautiful performance alone, we feel lonely.

Slavoj Zizek said, ‘Melancholy is a feeling of losing something that you never owned in the first place.It comes from deceiving and pretending.

Whoever is by my side, we cannot possess him.

The alienation, depression (melancholy), and anxiety that modern people experience are fundamentally all caused by the meaninglessness of human existence.

Adorno saw that art could express the experience of pain, escaping from rationality.

Therefore, in order to survive in a dark reality, a work of art must be identified with a dark one.

As such, this work expresses the solitude and desolation of human existence.