Be Painful

By Young Tae Choi

Young Tae Choi currently works as an Executive Art Director in POST-i (a Korean user interface company), teaches a drawing class at UBC GSS, and is helping Origin Church plant a church at UBC. He is studying towards a Master of Arts in Theological Studies at Regent College. As a filmmaker, he is also writing a screenplay dealing with the last residential school in Canada.

What I explored through this work was a hopeless man who is isolated from God, by expressing the man being stuck in his own world that he made. The man in this picture buries his head in his hands, hunches his upper body down, and is tightly locked in the frame of the small canvas. The soul of the man remains painfully in his tiny domain for a long time because he just knows of God without experiencing God in his daily life. He is an orphan, who does not personally know the love of the Creator, and a homeless person, who does not dwell in the presence of God—i.e., the kingdom of God—just as I used to be a hopeless man.

Be Painful. 1000 x 727 cm. Oil on canvas, 2002.