Explorer

One week of school holidays is officially over but I am still so overwhelm with work. Anyway, work and busyness aside, after one week of patient waiting, my newly purchased art piece is finally up on my wall. This piece is titled "Explorer" by Shay Kun, an Israeli artist who is based in New York.

In this series of paintings, Kun has reversed the relationship between natural and artificial. There is no space/time continuum in the background. But the foreground remains anchored in the literal world of the hot air balloons. There is actually a very philosophical thought behind this painting - that if one were to look at the world from a high vantage point, one would know that the world is spherical and not flat. We have always thought that Columbus was the first to establish this fact. But if we were to dig deep into history, it was actually Ptolemy, a Greek philosopher/mathematician who first discovered that the world is indeed round, in 150 BC. How could such important knowledge be lost, so much so that people in the medieval times considered the world to be flat again? This relativity towards knowledge and time fashions Kun's work. Isn't that amazing?