Lingering
Moon Cave, 40x120 inches, 2012
For years, I have gathered torn and
ruined canvases. I hid them in my studio corner until I realized that they
provided the perfect material to explore my psychological landscape. Instead of
using the traditional clean canvas, I used my trash left-over from my
art-making. The idea to experiment with left-over trash is connected to the
daily life of my grandmother and my mother. It was necessary for them to
recycle materials for living and at the same time, to create beauty for the
household. When I was a kid, we had a traditional Korean paper door. This paper door was vulnerable even to slight
pressure from fingers, and was often ripped. My mother would cure the damage by
covering holes with paper and also layering with
flowers and leaves to decorate. I thought that was beautiful; it was art-making
in life.
My approach has been intentionally rendered to
present psychological landscapes produced by methods of recycling memory and
art. Originally, I used a method of attaching pieces of torn canvas repeatedly to
create a background for my portrait painting. However I recognized in this harsh
and ripped texture, with its spontaneous threaded lines resembling roots and
branches, a portrait of my inner garden which expressed the unconscious,
spontaneous, and gestural layers of context in my mind. My paintings are
generated by torn canvases and threads, whose harshness is mitigated by lace
which recalls the flower patterns on my mother’s door. Floating on these layers
are my subconscious and unconscious inner mental shapes; to emphasize this raw
and dreamlike texture, I restricted the color palette.
This
series explores the uncertainties of expression and the attaching process. It
is representative of the reality of my memory and my underlying abstract
landscaping. This process of recycling and attaching extends my practice of
painting beyond a superficial activity and into the space between lingering
memory and art.
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