Installation view of 《Quite Time》 (GIMYE, 2024) ©Daewon Yun

1. Faith

When I was young, religious activity felt like an assignment I didn’t want to do. At certain times, I had to give up things I enjoyed and remain in a specific place for long hours, where I was required—regardless of my actual state—to maintain a devout heart and a sacred attitude. Perhaps because of this, I grew suspicious of every rule and regulation associated with religion. I disliked God, and I resented Him.

Then one day, I found myself in a critical situation, and not long after, it was resolved safely. In truth, it was nothing more than a small incident that unfolded over a rather short period of time. Yet the reason I still remember it is because, at the moment it was resolved, I found myself crying out from deep within my heart, “Lord, thank you.” After that, I stopped all religious activity.
 


2. Doubt

What is an absolute being? What is the world to Him—and what am I? How can one trust Him? Where does faith in Him begin? Fundamental questions about faith continued to circle endlessly through the relationships, events, and environments I encountered as I lived, branching out in multiple directions and shaping my thinking. I came to believe that individual subjectivity, justice, convictions, and values are all based on “belief,” and thus, when trying to understand someone, I habitually examined what they believed, why they came to believe it, and how strongly they held that belief—tracing the origins of their faith.

What troubled me, however, was the question: “What do I believe?” I always doubted the things I believed in. Doubt might have led me toward better directions, but unfortunately, I was too busy negating everything. My aversion to belief only dragged me into a swamp where I could not understand myself. Consumed by depression and skepticism, I eventually sought out a professional and began counseling. After several months, what I realized was that an unknown anger and frustration toward things I could neither doubt nor control had surrounded me for a long time. And the specific objects of that anger were “God” and “my father.” 



3. Question

I stopped going to the professional. He intended to dig into my feelings toward my father, and I wanted to avoid that. Instead, I began chasing “God” once again. This was not an interest in religion. I simply wanted to know why belief never formed within me, and why others believed in God. I thought this might be a way to resolve my anger.

For that reason, the object of my pursuit was limited to the monotheistic God and the Bible that were directly tied to my childhood experiences. I did not think it necessary to visit many different Catholic churches, since Catholicism is centrally organized, sharing the same doctrine and form wherever one goes. Instead, I more frequently visited nearby churches and Christians. I moved among various denominations, asking them why belief was necessary, why they believed, and how faith in God had taken root within them.

Most pastors and priests preached their doctrines and convictions, which, as expected, filled me with discomfort. Of course, they must have been even more uncomfortable, as I persistently dissected the reasons I could not believe in an absolute being and the points that inevitably made me angry.

My anger-driven questions often touched not only on personal belief and biblical content, but also on the structural problems of religious institutions themselves: Isn’t belief being used as a pretext for business among people chasing unreachable hope? If belief changes depending on individual will, isn’t that being not truly absolute, but merely something you choose to call absolute? If interpretations change with the times, can such texts truly be scriptures that contain truth?

Looking back, I realize that I was simply firing my anger at them. Yet my heart was more desperate than anyone’s. I wanted to be liberated from anger. I wanted someone—anyone—to persuade me and grant me belief.

About half a year into this process, exhausted by repeated confrontations and their outcomes, something intriguing happened when I followed a stranger—let’s call him X—I met on the street. Unlike the pastors and priests I had encountered, X empathized with my questions and began offering clear, logical answers grounded in the Bible. He was confident that belief in a particular religion begins with scripture, and that once one realizes its contents are “facts” rather than “fantasy,” faith will naturally form. He then carefully explained how to read the Bible.

I was captivated by X’s explanations, and the doubts I held began to fall into place one by one. Before long, I followed him to his church.
The people I met at X’s church gave me numerous answers, and through their individual stories, I learned how belief had taken root within them. Each of them carried their own experiences with God and an earnest desperation toward faith. Yet even as time passed, unresolved questions remained, and I once again grew dissatisfied with the particular rules they proposed.

Even there, I was someone who conspicuously resisted belief. I complained to those teaching doctrine and openly expressed my anger toward God. To them, my behavior seemed like mere petulance—something that would pass once I had “learned enough,” “known enough,” or “realized enough.” So I focused even more intensely on doctrine. I studied it daily, spending several months immersed in it. When I had grasped its contents and structure to a certain extent, I concluded that there was nothing more I could gain there. My problem was no longer one of knowledge. Knowing about an absolute being and believing in one were entirely different things.
 


4. Answer

After tasting defeat once again, the final place I turned to—after going in circles—was a Catholic church. Catholicism regarded the doctrine I had studied as among the most dangerous ideologies. Yes—the stranger X I had encountered earlier was a follower of a well-known cult. When I revealed my experiences to the priest, the moment the name of that religion was mentioned, his gaze became a mixture of disgust, anger, and concern.

I was half-dragged into classes designed to dismantle the knowledge I had acquired in the cult. Several people who had gone through similar experiences attended these classes with me. One of them, Y, had been a teacher of that cult’s doctrine. This puzzled me. To teach doctrine, one would have had to study there for at least a year and be a high-ranking believer with strong faith—someone with little reason to leave unless something extraordinary had occurred. Most of them seemed happy under a firm belief.

I asked Y whether he had been happy there. He answered that despite the repetitive routine of prayers from dawn until late at night and surviving on meals bought with a single thousand won, he had indeed been happy. This only deepened my confusion. Then why, I asked, was he here now, taking these classes? Y replied that the stability provided by belief—and the happiness built upon it—was like a drug.

After that, I participated in a camp organized by the church. For several days, I ate, slept, and prayed alongside Catholics, following their ways. I simply went along with the flow—studying God’s history, reciting the Bible, singing hymns, sharing thoughts, and performing rituals. Doubt remained, but my emotions were different from before. There was nothing new, nothing I desired, nothing that angered me anymore. I felt slightly happy, slightly sad, and slightly blank.

Even now, I was still struggling between distrust and denial of the absolute being, and the desire to rely on and lean into Him—still haunted by the shock of that childhood moment when I cried out, “Lord, thank you.” In the end, what I had truly sought was not the root of my anger or genuine knowledge of God’s existence, but simply a way to stop negating and doubting myself. Everything I had gone through happened because I believed that faith would bring me stability.

That is to say, this entire sequence of events began not from doubt, but from belief. And the emotions that tormented me so deeply were born not from doubt, but from belief.
 


5. 현재

I continue to doubt, continue to pursue belief, and continue to ask, “What is it that I believe?” Some believe in hope, some in fate, some in justice, some in freedom, some in dreams, some in numbers, some in relationships, some in sensation, some in memory. Belief sustains individual lives, forms collective cultures, and constructs the systems of the world. We live within belief, and we need it. When belief is absent, we search for something to believe in, or we create something we want to believe in.

For this reason, I continue to observe what it is that we believe in and rely upon today—in other words, what this world worships, praises, and idolizes. This may be my way of understanding myself and the world, a method and an attitude that will persist until I stop doubting.

References