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A New Song of Space: My canvases are painted to be torn apart. To tear is to question the art of our time, and my answer is folding and rejoining the torn fragments. Three-dimensional space forces me to give up the plane, and it also makes me believe in giving up for renewal. My paintings remember things that should have been given up. Fragments torn out of my paintings evince the death of the objects of my perception and expression.
My hands, recalling these evidences, reconstruct afresh an unpredictable nerve system in the body of space where the winds blow free.
Wherever pictorial fragments meet like the lines of longitude and latitude, the cells of knots are produced. Knotting is uniting; it is a visual language that totalizes material and spirit, positive and negative, dialectical opposites, you and me. This work testifies the thought in which the point, line, plane, and volume unify in space. I was born in this age to work on the canvas that has both valid plane and valid three-dimensional space.
(August 2007, translated by Wolhee Choe)
The Door of a Plane: the canvas’ witness: We are born of a plane, with the dream of becoming expansive, opening into a third dimension. This dream, to shed the hidden crust and to defy the limits of the plane’s hold, was in need of an artist who could make us stand in a new space. To be supine is to be dead.
To become erect, we are folded and folded again; we are torn and rejoined. Experiments with deconstruction and reconstruction, order and chaos, condensation and restitution, pulling off and putting together transform the plane into the reality of space, and allow us to open the gate, through which the winds blow in and out.
We become bodies from the fragments of images that are made into flesh and bone, through which the ki and blood colors flow. Freed from the plane, we become breathing forms with pulsating surfaces and myriad pictorial components.
Now let us make shadows like other objects and living forms. Not as virtual images, but as real objects with spatial dimensions, let us, in the full dress of painting, stand in the light. The artist Shin Sung Hy has given us the means to reside in the spaces of art.
(August 2007, translated by Wolhee Choe)
Working with objects: Some ordinary objects and painting tools that have been part of my work are now old, some of them damaged. Summoning them from their corners of rest, I made them the protagonists of my work with paper.
Art is said to be a process of discovery like a treasure hunt, but the material and method of my paper work were not hunted after as they stared down at me in my studio: the brushes that dreamed of expression, the scissors that cut up that dream, the mirrors that reflected back space, the palette that held thoughts redoubled, the toys that spurred the growth of my children. Experimenting for their proper constellation in space, I felt these objects driving me through the narrow door of imagination. Paper is a plane produced to be held or to be torn, whereas objects, even the smaller objects, require three-dimensional space. I combine these objects with different dimensions, without sacrificing their characteristics, into a totality.
Paper demands a pile of one hundred folds to create a volume into which the object could enter. I made the smallest space for each object, a house befitting the body. The paper escaped the boundaries of the plane, and the object compromised as half a solid that hid its body.
To the homes, where my objects would live with my name inside; may you live longer than I. That possibility gives me pleasure.
(August 2007, translated by Wolhee Choe) |
