I can trace the origin of the Snowscape series back to my early childhood.
Having spent my childhood in Belgium until I was eight, my parents would take me around Europe on various trips. The place that left the most definite impression on me during such trips was the snow-covered mountains of Switzerland. I still have the photograph of myself around age five or six, gazing afar and sketching away at a Swiss lakeside.

Some twenty years later, I would come to stay in France. For a period, I was absorbed in creating works using waves and light as a motif under the concept "Expression of the transition of nature through the passage of time in painting." I once went to Mont Blanc during this period to see the snowy mountains, having suddenly thought of stopping over there on my way back from the Basil Art Fair. There I found a "form" that obviously could never have been created by humans, but only by the great forces of nature. This "something" had taken an incredible amount of time in its formation which easily surpasses that of a person's lifetime or even that of human history altogether.

After staring at the sight until dusk, I descended to the lower world (best described as the "mortal world"). I felt as though I had been dragged back to ordinary reality. I yearned to convey the world I had seen through my painting. Then more years went by. I needed to clarify this idea so that the definitive technique and the concept that can convey this impact became more apparent to me. Since then, I have visited Zermatt and Interlaken in Switzerland numerous times. At an altitude of 4,000 meters in the thin air, I held my breath so my hands wouldn't shiver when I released the shutter.

Nothing particular triggered me to start working on this series, but I guess I slowly began preparing for it as I always kept it somewhere in my awareness. Eventually, my experience in creating numerous different works might have formed the foundation of this series.

A particular person described this series as "a futuristic science-fiction world after the extinction of mankind seen by a satellite." I then remembered the quote by the French anthropologist, Claude Levi-Strauss: "The world began without man and it will complete itself without him."

Art is indeed "Something like a device that prompts a release from the actual real time in a man's life." I would be most grateful if Snowscape could revive the memories from our distant past which has been long forgotten but still exists in our DNA, while at the same time be a futuristic sight that makes us think human existence happened a long time ago in the past.

 

*Claude Levi-Strauss "Tristes Tropiques" 1955