Instead of using ordinary buttons and pins to stitch up clothes, Korean-born artist Ran Hwang creates amazingly large installations of birds and cherry blossom trees. When you look up close, the amount of individual buttons is somewhat overwhelming, but from afar, the installation transforms into one breathtaking image.

“My immense wall installations are extremely time consuming and repetitive manual work,” says Hwang. “This is a form of meditative practice that helps me find my inner peace. Pins are used to hold buttons onto the surface to form a silhouetted image, or to disintegrate such image. No adhesive is used so the buttons are free to stay and move, which implies the genetic human tendency to be irresolute. I use buttons because they are common and ordinary, like the existence of human beings.”

“By hammering thousands of pins onto a wall, I discover significance of existence,” she adds. “Like the monks practicing Zen facing the wall, my work is a form of performance that leads to finding oneself.” Hwang graduated from the School of Visual Arts in NYC and has exhibited her work in New York, Paris and Seoul.

The artist

Ran Hwang's website