[100 Challenge] DanJi’s reading note_46

Unleash
How to make what I have now a weapon of growth
Author Cho Yong Min
Publishing Wisdom House
Issue 2022.10.20

Did the Neolithic people imagine that their rice bowls would be enshrined in museums in the distant future and treated as precious? So you never know. In the distant future, the value of the standard industrial products we use daily may change completely.
The artist who expressed this imagination through art is Daniel Arsham. Asham is active in various fields of art, such as painting, sculpture, architecture, video, and performance, and is gaining massive popularity with his Future Relics Perpetual Present and The Fictional Archaeology series. His world of work presupposes an exciting assumption that 'what we are currently using will be discovered around 3000 A.D.' We create familiar telephones, basketballs, T-shirts, hats, Porsche sports cars, and Pikachu figures to look old and corroded as if they were ancient relics. I have physically 'received' his works about twice, and I have experienced a strange sense of time that seems to have reached the future over a thousand years ago but is paradoxically obsessed with the moment of 'now.'
The crystal embedded inside the object is another impressive aspect of Asham's work. Whether it is a phone, a Pikachu, or a Porsche sports car, the surface is corroded, the inside is clearly visible, and the crystals protrude inside. Why did you set the setting that crystals grow in a corroded object? Since he passed on the interpretation to the audience, whenever I see his work, I always think of Buonarroti Michelangelo Buonarroti Michelangelo.
"I saw an angel trapped in marble and cut the stone until he was free from the cold stone."
According to Michelangelo, the angel statue was not born at his fingertips. The angel was already in the stone, and he just cut the stone to free the angel. In Asham's work, I have read similar messages inside ordinary and everyday items such as hats and basketballs. It's just that we didn't recognize that fact. In that sense, Asham's work allows us to see everything around us with a new perspective. Who knows if anything special or new will contain brilliant crystals inside? No matter how familiar an object is, who is sure there are no aspects we have not yet seen? How much do I know about the objects, environments, and people I am familiar with? If crystals are sprouting inside it, am I the person to find them?
How do people find completely different possibilities even in situations that seem less worth thinking about, new people discovering values others don't know about, and people who derive their best potential from someone else's thinking? How do they solve the problem at hand?