Kim Seung-hyun
The author is an editorial writer at the JoongAng Ilbo.
I saw a shark at a museum. It was suspended in a tank, jaws open like the creature from “Jaws” (1975), and it startled me. The more than four-meter tiger shark was preserved in formaldehyde. It looked as if it might lunge at prey, but it was a lifeless specimen. The work, created 35 years ago by British contemporary artist Damien Hirst, came as a striking encounter for a casual visitor drawn to a recent exhibition at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art.
On April 1, 63 days ahead of the June 3 local elections, staff from the Daegu Metropolitan Election Commission, along with election commission mascots and characters from the E-World theme park, hold a campaign encouraging voter participation beneath cherry blossoms at E-World in Dalseo District, Daegu. [NEWS1]
First shown at London’s Saatchi Gallery in 1991, the shark piece stirred controversy. Its title, “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living” (1991), is as unsettling as the work itself. It expresses the paradox that people live with anxiety about death while failing to fully grasp that it can happen to them. Standing before the tank, I found myself reflecting on mortality in ways I had not expected. Hirst’s message, it seemed, still cuts across time. It also explains why he reportedly requested a shark “big enough to eat you.”
Hirst’s insight places humans somewhere between fear of death and longing for life. His broader body of work repeatedly explores the transience of existence. A photograph of the artist at 16 smiling beside a severed head, a cow’s head attracting maggots and flies, a platinum skull set with diamonds, and stained-glass works made from thousands of butterfly wings all evoke unease and emptiness. Yet they also prompt a brief awareness of being alive, if only for a moment.
In his mid-50s, however, Hirst turned to cherry blossoms. Over three years he produced more than 100 paintings, later exhibited in France in 2021. Unlike his earlier installations, these works are bright and painterly, but the underlying message remains similar. Hirst has said that cherry blossoms contain themes of beauty, life and death. They bloom vividly and fall just as quickly, echoing the emotions people feel each spring. Petals scatter in the wind, drawing quiet sighs, while spring rain is dreaded for hastening their fall.
Few subjects convey the sense of impermanence as vividly or as immediately. The Yeouido Spring Flower Festival in Seoul begins on April 3, yet by the time this column appears again in two weeks, the blossoms will likely be gone. Their brief presence heightens their meaning and deepens the sense of loss that follows.
A similar sensibility appears in everyday life. Last Sunday, a middle-aged woman photographing daffodils in a church garden murmured to herself, “How bittersweet.” Her words captured both admiration for flowers that endured winter and regret at how quickly they will fade. Those who have lived through their own fleeting “golden years” find such scenes especially poignant. Spring flowers seem to contain beauty, life and death all at once.
With two months to go before the local elections. A citizen walks past campaign posters for the June 1, 2022, 8th nationwide local elections displayed outside the Mangmi 1-dong Administrative Welfare Center in Suyeong District, Busan, on May 19, 2022, the first day of the official campaign period. [SONG BONG-GEUN]
This sense of transience also emerges in politics. As candidate primaries for the June 3 local elections unfold alongside the spring flower season, voters are again showered with messages filled with promises. Names, faces and résumés arrive in streams of unsolicited texts, each appealing with the tone of a love letter. Candidates present themselves with earnest expressions, as if they can grant any wish asked of them.
Yet experience suggests otherwise. After elections end, the stage often falls silent. President Lee Jae Myung said on March 30 at a town hall meeting in Jeju that politics should become a competition to perform well at the level of the people’s expectations. In practice, however, that competition rarely endures for long.
Voters briefly become the focus of attention, only to be forgotten soon after, like fallen cherry blossom petals scattered on the street. The fleeting “golden moment” of voters returns each season, as brief and fragile as the blossoms themselves, leaving behind a familiar sense of emptiness.
This article was originally written in Korean and translated by a bilingual reporter with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom.
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