Blurring The Line Between Man And Machine Through Sculpture

Dark Cloud 9

Seong-Woon Shim draws inspiration from his childhood experience of building plastic models. In his current work, one can also spy a hint of RPG games like Neon Genesis Evangelion, where humans hop onto gigantic robots which stride into the horizon. Each of Shim’s pieces resembles something you’d see in a big budget sci-fi production, and despite their immense size, each part is painstakingly detailed.

Shim’s concepts derive from the marriage between humanity and robotics. Over time, sci-fi films and animation have seen robots increasingly evolving into human forms. Seeing this as a union of the human body’s organic form and the mechanical form machinery, Shim has dubbed his method “orchanic.”

The appearance and suggested function of his work are something fantastical by today’s technological standards, but Shim’s work is predictive of a not-so-distant future in which the line between man and machine will become more ambiguous, and the relationship between them will become something symbiotic.

Cockpitness Arm

For another artistic perspective on humanity’s connection with technology, check out the work of sculptor Ziwon Wang.