Not Understanding My Heart

"The Warmth of Loss"
My emotion is sadness.
It is closer to an unaccountable sadness laid low along the floor of everyday life, not bound to any particular event. Growing up in a childhood environment where blame and judgment came before encouragement, I came of age conscious of others' eyes, without forming sufficient trust in myself. That shrunken heart settled inside me, like a habit, for a long time.
I think of people like myself — those who, by temperament, are bright, but who, having passed through repressive surroundings, have lived without fully exercising their natures. In the end, what I chose was "a training in empathy" toward others. My sadness is not weakness but the trace of long endurance; my painting, on this emotional ground, has come to understand and represent figures not as objects but as objects of empathy.
This sadness, rather than staying as simple depression, touches the sense of loss for time and relationships already passed. From the very beginning I wanted to hold this loss on the picture plane. But the loss I intended is not a coldly severed state; it is a state where, even after the disappearance, the temperature of feeling remains. So my painting, while dealing with loss, tries to leave warmth there with it. This is closer to an attitude that does not give up on relationship even after what has gone has gone. This attitude touches my way of looking at the subject — the question of "the gaze." In observing a person, I attend to the layers of time and feeling that have accumulated within them. The eye is not merely an organ that perceives fact; it is a medium that senses the time the subject has come through and the air between, and my painting becomes a device that condenses that sensing into a single picture.
In the working process I assume countless similar scenes and select the most effective gaze. It is a thoroughly subjective choice, but it is also an attitude of recognizing that this remains only one viewpoint. I hope that viewers gaze and read the figure in their own ways, and that within that gaze new meanings and relationships are generated. My painting aims not to converge on a single reading but to lead the viewer's gaze into a state of dispersal and expansion.
This awareness of the gaze leads to an exploration of color. For me, color is more than a formal language; it is the accumulated result of everyday experience, feeling, and habits of thought. I did not want to fix my melancholic emotion in black and white; I wanted feeling to stay in complex layers rather than settle into one meaning through color. My awareness of color extends from the shock of the deep, multifaceted color I felt the first time I saw the skin of a Black person as a child — that shock has become the starting point of color experiments running through my whole practice. And it is also the occasion on which, through the figure of the Black subject, I came to express not the representation of a particular individual but a being into which my own feelings and senses are projected and substituted. Viewers may think of issues of race, but the subject is closer to a being through which my inner self is revealed by indirection. Here color does not function as an element explaining outward appearance, but as a language that speaks for feeling. My color is perceived visually and at the same time works as a synesthetic sensation accompanied by touch, temperature, and density; I intend that the way the viewer looks at the figure also gradually shifts onto the layer of sensation.
This attitude, centered on visual perception, also relates to the choice of materials. The slow, dogged process of working with animal-glue (agyo) and powdered pigment (bunchae) is laborious, but the result is sharp. Though these traditional Korean coloring techniques are increasingly less used, viewers who meet the work in person immediately perceive the difference in density and depth that comes from the materials, and this dogged process is also the way that most accurately holds my emotion and attitude.
The works I have begun recently treat the points where my feeling and the feelings of those around me cross, in the form of nude figures. This is the form that lays feeling most honestly bare. Through painting I want to leave a margin of empathy between figure and viewer, and within that gap I hope each viewer's memory and feeling rises quietly to the surface.