Sangyoon Yoon

Sangyoon Yoon is considered to be one of the contemporary artists who de-familiarized their pictures in order to let people see quite ordinary things in a rather unusual way. In his photo, the artist focused his attention on the everyday life of people, on the tension and stress that they experience. He emphasized that the representatives of different cultures and nationalities interact in everyday life. “Any contested space, any situation in which communication is absent or destabilized, is a fertile ground for the generation of a transcultural space between opposing groups of peoples or individuals” (Tomas, 1996, p. 36). It does not matter what cultural or national peculiarities people possess; what really matters is that they all have the same duties, obligations, and responsibilities. Looking at his photo, we can observe that there are both adults and children and all of them are involved in different activities (they are busy with a different type of work). The depiction of adults and children in one and the same photo demonstrates close ties between old and young generations, pointing out that both young and old generations are busy in their everyday life, though their interests and activities are completely different. All the people that are depicted in the photo are total strangers. It has a symbolic meaning: all people are strangers in a society, but still they have to cooperate, share some duties, and so on and so forth. If we look deeper at the picture, we can find out that the buildings depicted in the photo belong to different styles, which indicates that people always move from one country to another in order to improve living standards and life conditions. The peculiarities and atmosphere of East Asia are interrelated with the peculiarities of Europe. The gradation and tonality of different shades, tones, and tonality demonstrate that people are in constant movement and undergo constant changes. Watching at the photo, it becomes clear enough that there are people of a low social status and people of a high social status and people can change this status in the process of life development. The artist demonstrated that people from different countries and people of different political views are able to find a common language if they wish to, though they are depicted as total strangers. I believe the artist intended to say that people are too busy with their work and everyday problems that they even do not pay attention to people around them. We can definitely say that the photo is much individualized, as he depicted the photo through the prism of his perspective and personal experience. The technique of “de-familiarization” is very vividly observed in the picture. The artist managed to depict an average day of average people in a very extraordinary manner. The work is much related to the longer tradition of de-familiarization: it seems that the photo describes an unreal life, as everything is mixed there, though it simply helped the author express his ideas and implement his …