I believe this tendency to deny reality is fundamental to human existence.
Ajit Varki, an American biologist, argued in his book Denial that humans developed a cognitive mechanism to suppress the terror of death—an evolutionary trait that distinguishes us from other species.
In the ancient Indian epic Mahabharata, it is said: “We know we are mortal, yet we live as if immortal.”
This denial has fueled the richness of human culture—but also distorted our perception of reality.

Ernest Becker, in The Denial of Death, explains that when the awareness of death meets our instinct for self-preservation, a powerful fear emerges—accompanied by an overwhelming need to escape it.
He states that “the primary function of cultural worldviews is to manage the terror of death,” and that “our self-worth stems from the belief that we contribute to a meaningful universe.”
I believe this instinct for denial is deeply embedded in the images of “nature” that stand in contrast to our urban environments.

The “nature” we desire is rarely nature itself.
It is a sanitized, curated image—packaged for comfort and safety.
In truth, wild nature is harsh, hostile, and unpredictable.
Lush green foliage conceals parasites, fungi, insects, and pathogens.
Even so-called “solid wood” furniture is pressure-treated with steam and toxic chemicals, and every surface we touch is coated in plastics.
We mistake the texture of polyurethane for nature itself.

The nature we love is ultimately an illusion—engineered for our comfort and security.
Though steel, glass, plastic, and concrete are often considered cold and lifeless, they are the most commonly used and widely appreciated materials.
These four materials dominate nearly every environment we inhabit—not because we are surrounded by them, but because we chose them, we liked them.
In truth, we have encased ourselves in the very things we desired.

In this project, I aimed to visualize the cognitive architecture of denial.
Using sheets of plastic film, I layered images from different times and places, cut and rearranged them, then re-photographed the assembled compositions to create new master negatives.
Through this disjunction of images from reality, I sought to resensitize the viewer’s perception of what is real.
I stripped away the original color and redefined each image with artificial surfaces—like the roughness of concrete or the gloss of plastic.

In the end, this work is a question: What are the materials, ideas, and illusions that shape the environments we live in—and the images we revere as “nature”?
Even if the answer is unpleasant or mundane, it may still reveal a more honest slice of the reality we are, deep down, trying to face.

Winter 2020,
Written in Lampang
Hakbong Kwon