There is nothing that causes me as intense cognitive dissonance as the image of a mechanical body in the act of fragmentation. The image is an attack on my core sense of coherence while exhilarating in its potential to describe what it feels like to have a physical body. I sense deterioration and loss of control of my body while observing the pseudo-death of the mechanical one, but it activates me. It is a distasteful catharsis that situates the norm of the body itself as a deformity, leading to antagonistic sympathy for the way the body exists.

What terrified me was not the fragmented form, but the hypothesized totality of the body. The idea of bodily wholeness felt more violent than its disintegration. Despite being segmented into muscle, fat, and cellular layers, the body is sealed beneath a single skin, creating the illusion of anatomical coherence. This so-called unity is no more than a fragile casing, like the shell of a grenade, barely containing internal pressure that threatens to scatter at any moment. Since then, I find myself compulsively imagining my body blasted apart, with fragments flying in all directions.

I am building a new body that passes through dissociative thinking structures. The process begins by cutting paper into small geometric forms, placing them onto black ground, and cutting them again to leave behind thin black outlines as traces of my gesture. As these outlines accumulate, they begin to store the repetition of fragmented contours. The repeated outlines resemble scars formed along the lingering traces left by a fragmented body. The traces self-organize, patterned along these scars, and spread like moss or lichen. The outer shell is fragmentary; the form is temporary; there can be no blueprint.

The complexity that arises here becomes a strategy for visual anesthesia. Fragmentation is rendered as excessive information, camouflaging the body’s material presence and inducing numbness. These devices are assembled and disassembled again to function as a body, suggesting another type of function. The body is rearranged along lines left by scars from different times and places, forming a structure that paradoxically reconstructs the moment of collapse.

The desire for fragmentation is always entangled with the deception of totality. This contradiction generates a pain directed toward the prototype of a body, one that was assumed to be a singular, coherent entity. The pain no longer aligns with either totality or fragmentation. It demands an alternative structure. What is needed is a surrogate body stitched with scars, neither scattered nor unified, but capable of enduring that pain.

Once a symbol of disease, civilizational collapse, and death, the zombie is now softened, sanitized, and mass-produced. It reanimates within consumable materiality, attaching itself to new formats and continuing to spread.

In the context of commercial design, the sterilized zombie is dismantled and reassembled into architectural forms that recall the foundations and frameworks of civilization. Contagion spreads not through organic contact but through the logic of structural replication, expanding like unauthorized architecture. What appears stable rests on visually neutralized remnants of decay and contamination. These structures ultimately simulate order, concealing their underlying fragility.

Situated within a transparent isolation chamber, the structure features a pair of protective gloves affixed to its exterior. While inviting physical engagement, all contact is fully obstructed by the barrier of the gloves, a device designed to manipulate the boundary between contagion and touch. Its tactile surface suggests intimacy, yet tactility is withheld, permitted only through a simulated gesture. These conditions form a paradoxical mechanism that simultaneously solicits and denies touch. Quarantine becomes the premise of sensation, and contact is reduced to a gesture executed without actual sensation.

Plush toys modeled after the monster from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein form a strange cross-reference that inhabits a space of inconsistent logic. This grotesque hybrid, merging a symbol of social anxiety with a symbol of emotional attachment, resembles a survival strategy chosen by the monster himself. It is a strategy to secure affection and achieve coexistence. That, indeed, is the strategy.

The monster seems to have adopted two distinct survival tactics. One is fabricated cuteness, a transgressive strategy for coexistence. The other is symbolized monstrosity, a hereditary strategy that preserves minimal archetypal traits to signify otherness. He chooses to be cute to obscure the ontological antagonism rooted in his own alterity, yet never stops reminding us that his body is a patchwork embodiment of otherness. Through tactics learned from popular culture and commercialization, he borrows mutative imagery such as green skin, sutured incisions, and screws in the neck to emphasize that he is fundamentally different in origin. Ultimately, however, he seeks to disarm us with an almost predictable charm.

Reborn in plush form, the monster reveals his fluidity within binary structures while embodying contradiction. His strategized otherness does not remain neutral. It compels us to confront the logic of boundaries and the instability of fixed categories. While his mutations may be read as gestures of reconciliation, they are not without consequence. In the process of negotiating survival, many of his most antagonistic traits have been deliberately censored. Through this hybrid, I aim to explore the mechanisms of othering and to analyze the fractures embedded within the language of binary opposition.

The monster created by Frankenstein has been endlessly reconfigured through various media, undergoing a continuous series of transformations that elude clear distinctions between evolution and degeneration. Unlike finches, which evolved in isolation without natural predators, the monster has evolved under constant exposure to humans, with markets and capital as its primary predators.

This work disassembles and reconfigures monster plush toys into a strange and unfamiliar ecosystem, intentionally disrupting the familiarity and innocence embedded in their commodified forms. This process operates through a methodological approach modeled on pseudo-cell division, repeatedly branching subtle genetic differences among subgroups within a single species.

This work is exhibited as an anatomical form reconstructed from numerous plush toys modeled after the monster in Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein. In this site of anatomical investigation, where fragments of the mutilated monster’s body are pieced together to camouflage themselves as a human form, the hybrid functions to conceal the essence of the monster as a herald of otherness and instead strives to be assimilated into human structures.

While the original novel depicted a monster grotesquely stitched together from fragments of human corpses, this work subverts that archetype. By constructing a human form out of the monster’s assembled body parts, the act of camouflage can be read as an attempt to claim humanity. At the same time, it functions as a device that reenacts the narratives of bodies historically subjected to oppression and marginalization within the history of anatomical science.

The distorted anatomical visual cues go beyond the hybridization of monster and human forms, transforming into a medium that reconnects the history of marginalized bodies with anatomical knowledge. Though camouflaged as a human form, the reconstructed patchwork ultimately aligns itself with the socially excluded and historically exploited, echoing the fate of the original monster, who was also reduced to an object of dehumanization. This connection reveals how the progress of anatomical science has been built upon violent inquiries into nameless bodies, exposing the cyclical fate of marginalized beings repeatedly rendered non-human.

This concept is further clarified through the tangible processes of the work. By roughening and exposing the layered fabric pieces hidden within the plush exteriors of the monster toys, the newly assembled body deliberately escapes conventional anatomical classifications. It redefines the human body not as a biological object but as a fluid entity shaped by social and cultural forces. While subtly rejecting the normative framework of anatomical corporeality, the acupuncture-like needles seem to trace the fragmented and camouflaged alterity of the monster, as if this act of reconstruction marks the beginning of a form of healing. Each dismantled monster toy is traced back to its origin, reminding viewers of the hybrid’s fragmented and obscured identity, while also interrogating the narratives imposed upon bodies through the disciplinary lens of history and anatomy.

This demolition plan pertains to an architectural model assembled from fragments of composite counterfeit toys, resulting from incomplete legal understanding of intellectual property rights during the 1980s and 1990s. These fragments constitute historical artifacts within South Korea's subcultural heritage, influenced by content scarcity, limited market demand in relation to national competitiveness, and the unique cultural context of that time. These architectural forms, which could only emerge in that specific era, exhibit crude yet distinct structural characteristics. This model and its associated drawings serve as a record of that era and do not adhere to modern intellectual property regulations.

This demolition plan, including the model and drawings, may be reproduced, distributed, or commercially exploited, in whole or in part, without any authorization. Moreover, further alterations or use in other projects are expressly encouraged, as no claims of rights are made under current legal standards. Should this architectural model or its drawings be utilized, modified, or republished in other projects without prior consent, the user shall incur no legal liability or obligation for any potential damages or losses. 

What overwhelmed me at the landfill site was not only the scale of the waste, but also the intensely intimate traces of private histories embedded within it. These disparate discarded objects functioned as records of a standardized human life cycle, spanning from infancy to obsolescence.

This continuum became legible through specific objects, such as stuffed animals and skull replicas, that symbolically marked the opposing ends of a human lifespan. The soiled and torn stuffed animals resembled abandoned remains of humans and animals. Having fulfilled their role as objects of affective consumption, they reveal the collapse of the mechanism that once elicited care. These objects persist among the refuse as residual markers of obsolescent innocence and the passage out of childhood. Skull replicas, exaggerated in form and marked by intentional anatomical distortions, dilute the anxieties of mortality through formal exaggeration. Resembling human skulls yet rendered absurd, they reposition death as an aesthetic form, made to be consumed and discarded.

I interpret these discarded objects as animal carcasses and human remains that continue to be exploited after death, and construct from the allegories embedded in them an archaeology of life that never existed. The speculative organism is indexed according to the physical suggestiveness and contingency of each fragment and is reconstructed into anatomical form through the visual syntax of facial reconstruction. This process entails a reassessment of the conceptual and technical inconsistencies embedded within anatomy, osteology, and forensic anthropology. Disassembled stuffed toy fragments are consistently reorganized through interpretive inference, reimagined as soft tissues that elude verifiable reconstruction, or transfigured into simulations of body modification. Cast into a world not of their choosing, much like humans, they exist only within the paradox of extinction.