Dear My Little Prince
Dear My Little Prince – Korean Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul (2018), & MoCA, Busan, South Korea (2019)
Dear My Little Prince takes Saint-Exupéry's 1943 novella not as subject matter but as a structural condition, a text so thoroughly absorbed into global culture. First shown at the Korean Museum of Contemporary Art (KMCA), Seoul, in 2018 and extended to MoCA in 2019, the project asks what remains of the book's original provocation when it has been translated into 180 languages, adapted into musicals, theme parks, and commercial sentiment, and installed as furniture in the idea of childhood.
The answer the work proposes is not nostalgic recovery but critical inhabitation. Where The Little Prince was already an act of grief, a letter addressed across an unbridgeable distance, to a self the world had not yet finished forming, Dear My Little Prince extends that structure outward, into the systems and pressures that do the forming.
Sado, a single-channel film of just under an hour, was the gravitational centre of the work Laas included. Built from news footage run in reverse, it unwinds the myth of karōshi – the Japanese term for death by overwork, devotion consumed from the inside – frame by frame, until the frantic rhythm of labour loosens its grip and the image itself fades. It is a requiem for the body that breaks to keep going, for the worker absorbed into the infrastructure of production and returned as a statistic. Running backwards, the film does not restore what was lost; it simply makes the direction of loss visible.
Alongside Sado, two algorithmic moving-image works – ‘The Land of Tears’ and ‘You Alone Will Have The Stars As No One Else Has Them’ – were projected directly onto the gallery walls. Built from generative systems producing varied and shifting imagery, these works relinquish authorial control in favour of a logic that is neither random nor fully legible: something between score and weather. Their titles are drawn from the novella's most quietly devastating moments – the fox's farewell, the pilot's last sight of the prince. Where Sado is fixed, cumulative, and winding toward silence, the algorithmic paintings are continuous, open, and unresolved. Together, they describe the exhibition's emotional range: grief with a shape and grief that keeps generating.
Shown in Seoul, where The Little Prince is among the most widely read works of the postwar period, its images are part of the shared furniture of Korean cultural memory. It neither defers to that familiarity nor dismisses it. Instead, it holds the book's tenderness and its politics in the same frame: the little prince who sees clearly because he has not yet learned to rationalise, set against a world of bodies and systems that have.
Dear My Little Prince operates as both homage and interrogation, a letter written in the knowledge that the address is wrong, that something has been consumed or misplaced, and that the writing continues anyway.