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Sunho Choi From old, the mid-day has been called a "dot on one's mind-and-heart." To paint a dot on one's mind-and-heart... What dot am I painting on my own mind-and-heart? this is the question that has always haunt my work. I have always tried to express and represent Korean sense of beauty and sentimentality. The outward form or the means that I have adopted to this end is modern minimalism but what I try to capture through this simplest of form is Korean traditional aesthetics. I try to express the Korean sense of color and form through modern artistic means. The inspiration for this comes from the colors of traditional korean dress, hanbok, the simple grace of Korean architecture, and the high culture of the confucian literati, sonbi. Recently, I have been studying Buddhist meditation in search of new inspiration, ideas. My newest work involves dots. It is through this simplest and repetitive work that I see new images. It reminds me of the simple grace of Choson's white celadon. When one looks closely, one can see printed chinese ideograms or caligraphy underneath the dots. I have pasted pages from books at least a century old onto the surface of the canvasses. The half transparent silouette seems to contain and express the traces of time. The meanings of the characters themselves are not important. They are merely for the visual effects they create. For me, this, in its own way expresses the depth and the essence of Korean or Asian aesthetics. These pieces were created using traditional Korean rice paper and acrylic on canvass. By traditional Korean rice paper, I mean pages from old books that our ancestors used for their studies. Some of these pages have on them letters printed using wooden or metal removable types, but they also include pages that were written by hand, using traditional caligraphy. They include pages from the Four Books of Confucianism, namely, the Confucian Analects, Mencius, the Book of Means, and the Great Learning, as well we various Chinese Classics such as the I Ching, Book of Rituals, historical texts, and literature such as the T'ang poetry. These old texts not only convey the depth that only letter and characters can, but also enables one to feel the presence of those scholars and literati who used these texts for their studies and self-cultivation, thus providing an unmatched sense of time and historicity. Dots were a technique favored by innumerable painters throughout history. From the "Rice-dot landscapes" of Northern Sung to modern European Impressionism, Modernism, and, closer to home, to Kim Hwan-ki's "Where will we be, what will we become, before we meet again?", this has been a time honored technique. In that sense, my own dots can be seen as mere repetition. However, even though this a common technique, especially in modern art, upon closer look, one can see on the rice paper, letters and traces of time long past. It conveys an image that is very different from the one that is apparent at first glance. The starting point of my work is, like the opening of Chan Buddist meditation, the question, "What is this color?" That is, we start from a single dot and from there we build and continue our thoughts and actions. Expressions of changing time, space, and consciousness can take any form, any color. The important thing is to concentrate and meditate on these changes. I believe that Chan of Buddhism and the Chan of art are one. Of course, to achieve this state, relentless self-cultivation and the utmost sincerity are a must. I wish to produce works of art that reflect honest effort. Through simple dots, I wish to express my skill, emotion, and the depth of my soul. Rather that being a simple repetition, each dot contains in it traces of a new world. One dot coalesces into a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand dots, amassing the enormous energy contained in each. A beauty that is expressable only through the totality, that is what I wish to express. What I wish is to convey in the simplest way, the natural beauty and the long and rich history of humanistic learning of my land. I am what I paint. October, 2001
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