Installation view of 《Spear and Heap》 © Sahngup Gallery

The paintings I created this time depict landscapes from the Euljiro and Cheonggyecheon areas. These places were familiar to me, and I had painted a few works there before, but this was the first time I deliberately decided to focus on them. The landscape stretching from Jongno through Cheonggyecheon to Euljiro, with Sewoon Sangga at its center, had been divided into zones called “Sewoon districts” due to redevelopment projects that began several years ago. Stripped of their original names, these areas were being hastily demolished.

Houses that had once been densely packed so tightly that the ground was invisible had their roofs removed, then their walls torn down, eventually becoming small hills of debris. It was only last autumn that Sewoon District 3 was completely cleared and turned into an empty lot. When a site foreman ran toward me and asked why I was taking photographs, he soon softened after seeing the drawings on my phone and began telling me stories about what had happened in this place. I heard things I did not know, and facts that differed from what I thought I knew. When I returned to the studio and faced the painting again, I could not help but hesitate.

Spear and Heap was painted around this time. In the cropped and zoomed-in scene taken from a photograph of the backstreets of Euljiro, there is a piece of lumber jutting out between buildings pressed together like a canyon, with a heap of discarded objects piled behind it. I thought of a spear standing at an angle, and of corpses on a battlefield. This painting might have become a symbolic image of ruins, death, and resistance by depicting lumber and a heap as a spear and corpses. However, I could not proceed beyond rendering the scene with greater care.

How reckless it is to paint a landscape believing that one already knows it. It was better to sit down, listen, look, and paint. And so, the act of completing the remaining paintings became a process of repeatedly layering small brushstrokes to describe details within the landscape—erecting houses, forming streets, and adjusting perspective and light.

Installation view of 《Spear and Heap》 © Sahngup Gallery

All of these works were painted in oil. While I was certainly drawn to oil paint out of fascination and curiosity, my primary reason was my desire to render the unique colors and textures of this place as they truly were. With the change in material, the process of painting also changed. Whereas building up paint on Korean paper was a process of revealing parts from the whole, oil paint led me to structure the whole through the accumulation of parts.

The process of moving from giving form, color, and texture to objects toward forming a landscape resembled architectural construction. It dismantled my sense of distance from the landscape, drawing me inward so that I looked at objects as if I were directly participating in architecture itself. I placed art and painting in parentheses, adopting an attitude of listening to, seeing, and touching the elements within the landscape as I painted.

There seem to be landscapes painted because one thinks one already knows them, landscapes painted in order to know them, and landscapes painted while setting aside the desire to know altogether. I began with the first, passed through the second, and eventually arrived at the third—that is, simply painting.

A landscape reveals different appearances before painting, during painting, and after painting. After completing a work through arduous attention to detail and then returning to the actual landscape, it appears even more majestic. This is true not only of this place, but likely of all landscapes.

Looking at the paintings hung on the wall, they feel woefully insufficient and trite. Suddenly, I feel as though I am standing alone in a vast field. What else can be done? One can only continue forward.


Text by Jaeho Jung

References