Exploring the Definition of Utopia

'In 1516 Sir Thomas More wrote the first 'Utopia'. He coined the word 'utopia' from the Greek ou-topos meaning 'no place' or 'nowhere'. But this was a pun - the almost identical Greek word eu-topos means a good place. So at the very heart of the word is a vital question: can a perfect world ever be realised?'

http://www.bl.uk/learning/histcitizen/21cc/utopia/utopia.html

Ideas of the perfect image have been explored through out history. For century's the perfect society has been sought after. This has been represented in classical and biblical literature.

Won Ju Lim

"Lovely and haunting, these works exploit associations with forms ancient and recent by which we entertain fantasies and memories, hopes and fears--all forms of projection, puppet theater, the shadows on the window shade at night, as well as painting, particularly Asian landscapes and Baroque and Romantic scenes."

Source:http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_10_41/ai_10398982

"These new pieces make good on what Lim's past installations have striven for: wonderful and uncomfortable overlays and slippages of present and past, presence and absence, and the strange commingling of memory, fantasy, physicality, modeling, and illusion. They harness illumination, distortion, projection, and shadow as method and metaphor, leaving their viewers standing in the light and in the dark."

Source:http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_10_411/ai_103989822/

Inga Svala Thorsdottir

Thorsdottir wants to create her own utopian city in her home country of Iceland.

"Borg is a young and old longing. Borg sparks off bodily feelings, emotions, thoughts, and intuitions in the brain. In this time-space-continuum Borg is not immediately visible, but perceptible only for those individuals who can sense Borg within themselves.

This book explores the Idyll;

'The idyll represents a code for inwardness, connected with the dream of the simple life and the bliss of paradise - the fiction of better life'

'The exhibition confronts this topic in the form of a dialogue between established and young artist. Death and superficiality, illusion and delusion - the curator have succeeded in staging an exhibition that is both relax and tense.'

Idyllic ideas

• Bible scenes
• Arcadia
• Utopia
• Landscapes Painting 16th/17th century