포스트휴머니즘 미학과 뷰티디자인의 방향성 모색

With the emergence of high technology, the world has shifted from the letter-based analog era to the information and multimedia & cultural era where everything changes fast. The power of high technology has been expressed through most-humanism discourse in which human desire on human enhancement is reflected and with artistic keywords and contents in diverse media. A post-human refers to a perfect human being who is beautiful, healthy and moral and lives forever. Thanks the influence of post-humanism, a cyborg, a hybrid creature composed of organism (human) and machine (high technology), was born. Humans have promoted mechanical transformation or created a new hybrid species through an animal. In the organic hybrid species created through chemical and genetic modification, a path toward post-humanism has been clearly reflected on fictional characters in popular culture. A human body which appears in the field art and culture, however, should be understood as a substitute of the existence itself, not an entity separated from the soul. A human body has appeared as an art performer/material or producer. Even though post-humanism has emerged as cultural phenomenon in various fields such as philosophy, humanities, art and science, there have been few studies on it in beauty design. Considering the limitations of beauty industry in brain science and medical fields, therefore, this study attempted to investigate correlations between the hybrid aesthetics of post-humanism and beauty design and related features based on the expression characteristics on hybridity such as human-machine, human-technology and life-non-life. For this, it is needed to examine the characteristics of hybridity expressed in post-humanism aesthetics from the perspective of art fields. Furthermore, there should be studies on how these characteristics should be understood and developed in beauty design. In other words, this study aimed to discover harmony between inner beauty and outer appearance and establish a turning point for changing the viewpoint of beauty in terms of the creation of meaning in the aesthetics of beauty design. Therefore, this study discussed how things which have been defined as ‘normal’ should be interpreted, and how beauty should be pursued in mean beauty and tragic beauty as discussion on the followings: “Are the things defined as ‘beauty’ in conventional concepts really beautiful? “; “How can the heterogeneous beauty newly reconfigured as hybridity such as human-machine, human-technology and life-non-life be defined?” So far, beauty design has often been recognized as a field of formative art in which outer beauty is important. On the contrary, this study was conducted provided that a new era when beauty should be discovered inside has become. After escaping from a common concept that a lack of outer beauty does not correspond with the standards of beauty, those who have gone through hard and rough times can restore their confidence by sublimating the latency (artistic value) discovered in the inner world together with the outer beauty. Their shiny appearance can be expressed as tragic beauty. Even though human beauty would be evaluated based on outer appearance, each person’s inner aspect can be another beauty as well. In fact, this inner beauty would be true beauty discovered through the evolution of thoughts. In terms of discourse in beauty design, there should be discussion on wholeness which covers both inner and outer beauties. Hence, this study implies that beauty design should handle the aesthetic hybridity of post-humanism - contradiction and paradox.