Where does the gaze reach? From its inception, this exhibition considered the question of the painter’s artistic origins and their inherent perspective and attitude. It was an attempt to reflect on these origins while keeping some distance from discussions on painting’s relationship of influence with contemporary digitally transmitted images or its renewal as a medium. Ultimately, it settled on the self-portrait as a long-present theme in painting. Ever since its emergence in the medieval era, the self-portrait has functioned as something more than mere depiction of the self—it has been a pathway enabling the expression of artistic innovations and social messages. It is also recognized as a potential pictorial means of inducing explorations of one’s own multilayered identity.

Against this backdrop, the exhibition focuses on the matter of “representation” in the self-portrait. Painting has been widely understood to be the medium with the longest tradition in terms of representation. If we recognize the potential to show individual lives at a more subjective level—aspects of the communities to which they belong today, scenes of social incidents, and even minor objects from everyday life—this suggests that while the subjects of representation are always open, their selection is an uncommonly difficult matter. Moreover, if the value of art today is established through the perception of intersections between the times and the individual person amid a process of repeated convergence on the small scale and expansion to the larger scale, the self-portrait is quite a curious proposition as something represented by the painters who have produced the most “traditional” images in art history.

In their response to this, the two artists in the exhibition have sometimes actively visualized their identities as painters through free variations in their strokes, gestures, and tools. Other times, they have actively recognized their inability to fully capture things and sought to emphasize concepts while sidestepping objects. Indeed, while “self-portrait” and “representation” represent two nodes driving the exhibition, they also resemble presences that stand under the same shadow yet are unable to meet. As a result, a gap inevitably arises between the superficial form of the object and the image beyond it that the artist seeks to attain. For instance, HAN Sungwoo’s pomegranate Tree (2024), which is rendered in charcoal mixed with oils, creates something resembling the optical illusion generated by distance. The image is achieved on the boundary between constructing and disrupting an image, depicting and erasing. While it may seem at first to capture an image of the object, this quickly breaks down and is reduced to the artist’s gestures—that is, their presence and physicality—as visualized within the inherent properties of materials. In the case of self-portrait (2024), the image of the artist as seen from behind is captured at a scale beyond that of the viewer’s body, presented on a canvas measuring around 260 by 190 centimeters. It appears to outright reject the notion of a shape being captured within a single look. The elusive form on the canvas soon crumbles, and the narrative that becomes associated with the image—in a painting process resembling the pressing and rubbing of the brush—ends up vanishing. The opaque image that HAN creates is not an act of erasing but an emotional reflection of “having existed.” The blurriness, with its distancing from concrete form, can be seen as an attempt to represent a way of being through something akin to separation from the explicit naming of language. Conversely, the concrete transfer of specific objects onto the canvas in HAN’s withered flower series (2024) and the arrangement of hands in what appears to be a sequence in his series untitled (2024) and Hand on lap (2024) offer an even more dramatic visualization of the “feelings of absence” that he has often spoken of in connection with his existential stance. The concreteness of form makes these works seem to possess a narrative quality that contrasts with the previous ones, yet they induce a certain sliding even as they permit access to the symbolism of the object. For instance, objects such as hands signify the painter’s identity, yet HAN separates them from himself and situates them as objects of representation, thus reducing them to the state of symbol and neutral, unmoving still-life, or he captures a state that deviates from the universal ideas projected onto “flowers” as objects. In that sense, the shape of the hand fully situated on the canvas creates the potential for non-linguistic communication through its dislocation from expressions and its situation outside the canvas. As the flowers bow their heads, they reveal an object’s way of being, conveying deeper emotions beyond fixed language.

SON Hyunseon has adopted a somewhat different approach to HAN’s in posing and answering questions about the impossibility of complete representation. As someone who has used physical objects as intermediaries to express invisible desires, depicted vessels to capture flowing liquids, and sought to understand objects through the use of senses beyond vision, she may have viewed the self-portrait as an impossible subject for representation. Yet accepting and acknowledging this impossibility has been a way for her to prove her own existence. Where SON’s past work attempted to view objects side by side from the same position, her work in this exhibition looks ahead to a face-to-face encounter. To achieve this, she first initiates a dialogue that includes elements of depth and density. Indeed, her work is preceded by several workshops in which she meets face to face with one participant per day to share a dialogue. These conversations with others generate constant occurrences of deviation, hesitation, scattering, and waiting. Yet within the commitment to remain aware of these tensions and return to the right place, the dialogue continues, and the distance between oneself and the other is narrowed. Ultimately, the acknowledgment of incompleteness is an opportunity to renew oneself through others; it is a case of energizing one’s empty time alone through contact with another. In the process, SON may be establishing moments when it is possible to shift away from an idly passing everyday and enter a slightly different timeframe. She differentiates these experiences further through the interconnecting of multiple works. For example, the perception of standing back-to-back and being able to see with the eyes is adapted in tactile terms that demand contact from the viewer (Back Map: thermo-between-us, 2024). Through their encounter with colors transformed by momentary contact, the viewer is able to briefly access these moments of dialogue through sensory means beyond vision. They further respond to the narration that intermittently fills the space and to the small drawings and phrases played on the walls. Here, edited excerpts from the workshop dialogues are shown at random, providing a more three-dimensional here-and-now manifestation of those past times and places within the relationship connecting images with phonetic and character-based language. Additionally, the systems of visual perception conferred by the clear shapes continue to branch off and extend through real-sized thermal images of the artist as seen from behind (Back to Back: through warmth, 2024) or a view from behind that has been transferred along its contours with the next image-symbol derived from the body (Back to Back: edge of warmth, 2024). Through this, SON Hyunseon incorporates her own inner times, spaces, and body within a chain that associates with different sensory systems, rather than superficial depiction or interpretation.

What might we see at the end of the image? Images are constantly shifting, existing in fluid states based on the ideas and imagination of the viewer. There is an unavoidable contradiction within visual arts: the need to pass through a visual image (one attuned to the visual order) even while acknowledging the impossibility of representing the gulf between the object’s actual form and the image that we can distinguish. This exhibition starts with a discussion of the self-portrait, but the conversation twists and turns before directing itself to a view from behind—a surface that conceals expressions and explicit depiction. At the end of a perspective that looks in the opposite direction from forward, these works attempt to approach their objects in more three-dimensional ways deviating from narratives that have sometimes concealed or anticipated forms. Some might mention objects and parts of the body that seem like gestures of communication toward a wilting leaf; others may have conjured images of the creators themselves as they dispersed and delved into the forms, focusing on the tactile sense located upon the image. After a whispering that either aids or disrupts decoding of the image, impressions and interpretations slide and mend, and as things deviate from their original pathway and return to their place, each of us discovers aspects of “me,” “you,” and “us.” While the artists(’ images) may be absent here, they are also vividly present.

Credit

Participating artists : SON Hyunseon, HAN Sungwoo
Curated by KIM Sung woo
Text by KIM Sung woo
Installation technician : Mujindongsa
Photo by CJY ART STUDIO (CHO Junyong)
Sound by YOON Jaemin

Thanks for cooperation : d/p, BAE Enna, KIM Sung woo, LEAM Sooyoung, Leeje, LEE Hanbum, LEE yunjung, HONG LEE Hyunsook, HWANG Hyeran

Supported by Arts Council Korea, 2024 ARKO Selection Visual Art