The Being series consists of fully covering everyday objects with gold leaf, thereby erasing their original functions and colors. Through the act of covering, the artist simultaneously conceals the object’s material reality while cloaking it in an intensely ornamental surface, producing a moment in which established values and hierarchies attributed to objects are overturned. Beneath the thin metallic layer, objects are stripped of their names and roles and reduced to anonymous masses, confronting viewers with form itself, severed from all surface-based information.

These anonymized masses serve as metaphors for human existence as it accumulates and disperses through time. Within the ceaseless flow of time, countless lives begin and disappear, while their remaining traces intermingle without order, lingering like a single condensed mass. Some traces endure as legacies that illuminate human history, while others fade quietly, like dust settling beyond perception. The gold-covered objects symbolize these residual traces of existence, redirecting attention away from individual function toward the meaning of being itself.

The Being series forms a critical sculptural foundation that later evolves into the Barnacle series. What begins as a reflection on covered and condensed objects expands into a sculptural inquiry grounded in accumulation and construction, developing into a formal language that explores new forms of vitality and layered temporalities.