Korean-born artist Ran Hwang uses buttons and pins to create these awe inspiring installations. The immense amount of time and patience it must take to create these installations is a zen like process for the artist:

“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.”

I especially like the concepts that depict a caged bird. Based on how Hwang describes her process, infinite metaphors can be drawn from her work.