Artists Welds Incredible Chain Sculptures

Seo Young Deok welds chains into amazing life-like sculptures of the human body. His inspiration stems from the shock of experiencing the hustle and bustle of a big city for the first time to attend college in Seoul. Coming from a small rural province, the monotonous plodding and robotic motions of everyday life in the city looked to him like the entire city population acquired a virus that made them act like zombies. The Korean artist used mass-produced chains to represent the contamination that affects modern man. The decaying effects of the virus can be seen by the forlorn expressions in the busts and the decomposing limbs and heads of the full-figure sculptures. One of the sculptures, a 7 ft 6 in tall human head, cost Deok around $41,000 in materials, over a mile long of bicycle chains, and over a year to make. According to Deok, “I considered each part of the chain a human cell and used the chains to create a human figure. Thus, this being’s form has been created in contamination by materials in our current world. Several works in this exhibition use chains as accessories to focus on man’s endless vanity and ill-judged consumption habits.”