- Overview
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Chin Jung-kwon, professor of philosophy explores the realm of art via the keywords, “The Revolution of Imagination.”
- Book Intro
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In the book, Play, Art and Imagination, Professor Chin Jung-kwon declares imagination belongs to the realm of aesthetics and delves into the domain with a new keyword for Koreans, “play.”
The people in the Middle Ages had great imagination but the modern people will not accept it. In modernity, academic philosophy confined things by means of the unbreachable boundary of reason. It was from then on that the union of two things stopped being a free association and was bound to the chain of cause and effect.
But the opposite phenomenon has been taking place presently. All kinds of fantasies have resurrected and inundate the novels, films, and the Internet. How should one construe this? The author claims the new generation is more comfortable with their thought process having to do with images and not words. Imagination in today’s world is backed up by the “mechanical,” genetic engineering, and information sciences. Science fiction (SF) is no longer a literary genre. It has become a prerequisite for reality. The age where imagination is power itself has finally arrived for it is now the source of productivity.
The book introduces twenty games. The Acrosticon that lets the player read both horizontally and vertically and still understand the meaning; the Annergram that switches the order of the alphabet to construct a new word; the Anamorphosis that offers the truth in distortion; and the dice, chess, and card games in addition to standing on your head, puppet, and fireworks games.
Play, Art and Imagination explores these games and asserts that in the age of technology, imagination, which has undergone technological change to evolve into reality, becomes the very source of productivity. In today’s age when the power of thought is deemed more important than ever, this book has continued to pique curiosity and interest of many readers since its publication.
- About the Author
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Chin Jungkwon
Chin Jung-kwon is a professor at Dongyang University and director of Technology and Aesthetics Institute, in charge of research and synthesis of humanities, design and engineering in games. He majored in Aesthetics at Seoul National University where he also received his M.A. He studied linguistics structuralism at Free University of Berlin. In 1994, he introduced the discipline of aesthetics for the first time to the Korean public with his book, Odyssey in Aesthetics and has continued to explore the field in a unique way, while engaging in an active dialogue with the readers.
He is the author of the following books; Play, Art and Imagination, Odyssey in Aesthetics (3 Volumes), Western Art History (4 Volumes), The Magpie on the Scaffold, Requiem, Dancing Death 1, 2, Angelus Novus, Lectures on Contemporary Aesthetics, Map of Thought, and Essays on Aesthetics.
- Recommendation
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2005 Book of the Year by the Korean Broadcasting Company; 2005 Chosen as Book of the Month by the Publication Industry Promotion Agency of Korea