At the corner of AP CLOUD on the 13th floor, AMOREPACIFIC Korea HQ, there is a lucky dog that makes visitors burst out laughing. Lying sprawled on a suitcase with his eyes unfocused on anything particular, his tongue languishing outstretched and liquor bottles beside him, the dog looks like a drunk at night. This piece of art combines two pictures on the wall and a sculpture in front so that visitors are forced to cross its path. And the title of the artwork? It's Dog & bottle in Amsterdam by the artist Park Yong-sik (1971~).

Park made a parody of the famous Mazinger Z in his early years and he has continued to present artworks that personify friendly animals such as the cat, mouse and duck. The series Dog & bottle is made from pictures of a drunken dog with a liquor bottle. He carried them in his bag and, whenever he found just the right spot in cities such as Seoul, Paris and Dusseldorf, he opened his bag, laid the dog on the ground with the bottle next to him and took a picture of it there. The pictures exhibited at the Korea HQ of AMOREPACIFIC were taken in Amsterdam. The work involves a solid sculpture interlocking with plane pictures, while the drunken dog functions as quite a serious actor. The sight of strange cities is juxtaposed with the comic scene for dramatic effect.

The use of metaphor allows the dog to take on aspects of human life and, through the picture, the backdrop is transposed into local reality. The artwork poses questions to the viewer – why is this dog so drunk, does it show a scene of a lazy vacation or has the dog broken down from exhaustion and world-weariness? The particular questions viewers ask in part reflect their own circumstances. Society, artwork and audience viewpoint cross and reflect each other like a mirror, blurring the boundaries between life that's real and life that's fabricated. The city of Amsterdam comes into view as a common, verisimilar city that is actually to be found everywhere, rather than being grounded in specifics. It is difficult to find the words to describe the individual things that happen here where we live, but we can say at least that, perhaps, they are neither good nor bad on the whole and, surely, common to everyone. Likewise, the same object – in this case, the drunken dog – when juxtaposed against different backgrounds, creates a subtle, yet funny twist to the illusory grip we sometimes seem to place on the real world.