Polar Bear Eating Ice-Cream

Byun Dae-Yong was born in Busan, Korea in 1972. He utilizes popular images to create sculptures that reveal the other side of the modern consumer society. Polar Bear Eating Ice Cream is one of the series of his works based on the familiar images of polar bear appearing in Coca Cola advertisements. He sculpted the polar bear licking an ice cream with a happy face like a cartoon character. Smooth surface and pastel colors contributed to the lovely image of the bear. However, such display lets the audiences feel the threats polar bears are facing in the real world in a more dramatic way. Like the ice cream that soon melts away in the room temperature, the Antarctic glaciers are melting due to global warming, gradually taking home away from the polar bears. And human beings living in the same environment will soon confront the same problem. This is the way how the sculptor uses his unique but simple sculptural language to induce audiences to think about complex social issues.