Artist Statement
I come from a half-North Korean and half-South Korean heritage. Growing up, I heard lively accounts from both sides on the country’s divide, the Korean War, sacrifice, and survival. Hearing stories about my grandparents leaving everything North behind to escape war and violence made me question what remains when all that is physical perishes. I realized that the immaterial mind, preserved through love and blood, is one thing that cannot be taken away. Consequently, I became interested in the existence of minds.
The paintbrush is the intersection of the mind and the hand. I feel every brushstroke saving me from the grim thought that there is no mentality at all, warding off a purely physical world bereft of spirit. I feel the presence of the iridescent, fine-grained, and intricate human mind, but left to its own devices, without art, it can only infuse the world with its invisible ink. My mission is to surface the mind in visible, tangible paint.
I started by painting bodies as representations of the mind. Then, I discovered that a person’s mind can be revealed through the objects it perceives. Cabinet, dovecote, garden, house, palace… various metaphors have characterized the mind as a storehouse or a place. However, I view the mind as an assemblage of ordinary objects. I paint to render human mentality through the objects minds can perceive by creating highly detailed, metaphoric, and fictional arrangements of objects and spaces.
We are familiar with the properties of ordinary objects, making them excellent bridges connecting the physical and mental worlds. My encyclopedia of objects focuses on wood, fountain, snail, and stone. They are sturdy and full of texture, just like how I imagine thoughts when I hold them in my hands. The alchemy between objects mirrors the sparks that form between thoughts.
On the canvas, I build objects out of hundreds of small, squiggly lines and dots. The canvas has no boundary but the canvas itself. Laws of conventional gravity do not exist in the world of painting. Any object of any quantity can be stacked indefinitely in this limitless world. Hundreds of tree branches can hinge onto each other to create a vertical map that would otherwise fall apart if situated in the real world. Capturing the textures of imagined objects is essential to making them believable while keeping them grounded in the world of the mind.
The objects I paint celebrate their complexity and tenacity. In my stacked wood paintings, a thin line of gravity holds the hundreds of tree branches together. The way they balance shows the role of gravity, a force that has qualities similar to belief. One small belief can hold numerous thoughts together.
There is nothing as everlasting as the mind. The mind is a refuge for those who long for a land they can never return to. I want my paintings to be flagposts that remind the existence of the mind that it is real, alive, and persistent. Even when all is lost, the mind lives on.