The True Art of the Dinosaur
Sein Kim

What is the true art of the dinosaur? The dinosaur is but an image of our fossilized backward projection, predating humanity, perpetuated by an imagination as large as their presumed size. Just as the Chinese character gong (恐) in the Korean word "dinosaur" means "fearful" but also "perhaps" or "speculatively", the image of the dinosaur must be painted with the inevitable barrenness of factuality. And that limitation can't be overcome by going back in time, because we simply did not exist back then.

Therefore, true dinosaur art must be created by the absence of dinosaurs, not their presence. "The true sound of the dinosaur" is the subtitle of a subreddit[1] dedicated to dinosynth, a musical movement derived from black metal. Of course, no one knows what a dinosaur actually sounded like. But what we are trying to approach here is that the "true sound of the dinosaur" which almost naively substitutes black metal's heretical object of adoration by "dinosaurs," is an aesthetic worship that is only possible through a radical break from the past.

And ultimately, true dinosaur art should be motivating the premonition that the viewer himself or herself will one day remain to someone in the future as an absolute negative, an absence that not even loss could produce. Because the future is not something that lies ahead of us, but something that may arrive unexpectedly like a meteorite and completely overwrite our present. And the future will inevitably leave us unable to fully remember the present. True dinosaur art is art that can encompass past, present, and future all at once for that very purpose.

An example of this is the exhibition "Dinosavr" by Yesul Kim and Rémi Lambert. "Dinosavr" theatrically presents a worldview in which the days of the dinosaurs and our childhoods are synchronously superimposed, and their existence remains in the past in the form of a kind of imaginary documentaty or pseudo-artifact. A deeper look reveals that the dinosaurs and children in this exhibition do not simply coexist in the same world, but are recursively intertwined, each becoming a metaphor for the other.
In other words, they are not just present together, they are absent together.

In the intuitive belief that our present is an extension of our childhood, many past children are objectified by the thought of an "old self". But adults cannot fully recognize their past as children any more than children can fully recognize their future as adults. When the person you used to be, and the things you used to like or dislike, the people you used to play with or fight with, the things you used to long for or fear and imagine existed, the person you are now did not. True dinosaur art must be the art of the fossil, suggestive of all such things, where absence precedes loss.