From lines to space

 Grappling with an enigmatic question, "what is seeing," for a long time, I have done line-drawing works like insects grapping with their sensors. Afterwards, my collaboration with the visually impaired children opened a new dimension of seeing: this turned my quest from an individual-oriented to a community-oriented quest. That was a happy detour where I encountered another world of seeing.
  The tradition of Korean folk paintings Min-Hwa spoke to me in a very new language and I became attracted to it because of its root in a collective culture. Most interesting was the fact that folk paintings had a specific purpose and a unique history deeply embedded in our traditional everyday lives as a part of our collective symbolism and as a tool of communication. In this exhibition, I tried to provide a spatial dimension to folk paintings with a belief that through such effort we may reinvigorate the spirit of community; this process of creativity had an added significance as an inspiration to synchronize the past and the present.
Tradition is, for most of us, something familiar but something that cannot be defined clearly.
  I tried to reconstruct and reinvent tradition by challenging that very enigma. One way to reinvent tradition is to Return to our being as the MEMBERs of community and to RE-MEMBER the yearnings and desires inherent in the folk paintings. Thrilled by such possibilities I met our tradition with wonder and fantasy.
  The exhibition space is divided into two parts: Gallery-I presents my interpretation of the Painting of Spirit Hose Gam-Mo-Yo-Jae-Do. Gallery II is focused on the Painting of 'Scholar's Utensils' Chaek-Ga-Do. The "Spirit House" typically shows a shrine with a memorial tablet, a ritual table, an array of food, and flower arrangement commonly of peonies. Gam-Mo-Yo-Jae literally means that if Descendants think of a deceased one with a deep affection, he or she will appear to them. So I created a space and an aura for that in-between ancestors and descendents, utilizing a setting of a modern home theatre. In this way a shrine became a floating monitor box, while a ritual table became a standing chair surrounded by peony-decorated speakers and large-scale peony "murals."
  Gallery-II is filled with mirrors and glasses intermixed with my painting of the Painting of "Scholar's Utensils," which symbolized yearning for learning and the resultant social success in traditional Korea. My painting and its luminous reflections in multi-faceted mirrors are to present my own reinterpretation of the subject as the mirror of knowledge in itself and a symbol to mirror an endless desire for success through education within the collective entity of families. I thought the space configured in the traditional 'Scholar's Utensils' painting is not much different from the virtual space of internet which endlessly seeks to explore new information and knowledge. Such stylistic features as reverse perspective and multi-perspectives characteristic of the Painting of "Scholar's Utensils" became translated into my own space of spatial expansion, multi-dimension, and mesmerizing speed; the mirrors and glasses created the effect of endless reflection. The mirrors in the form of hangul alphabet 'ㄷ' and 'ㄹ,' which I like to call "Character-mirrors," are exhibited together in this gallery again express this same concept of multi-perspective. Within the outer frames I drew peony motifs. I placed one of them where a painting is supposed to be in order to open another virtual space of fantasy.
  Through all this process, I wished to reconnect the tradition of folk painting to our modern life and to revive the symbolism and spatial function of folk painting which were effective within a family and within a community in this process of reinventing and REMEMBERing the collective experiences of folk tradition, I came to realize that 'seeing' is a synthetic experience as with a peony which can be of lines, o space, of living flower, of time, and of sounds(even to be of speaker)…
_ Oum, jeoung-soon