Installation view of 《A Paradoxical Talk》 (Weekend, 2018) ©Hyundoo Jung

Portraitization of Landscape, Landscape-ization of Portrait
Yoonjoong Hwang
 
The forest is an environment rich in sensory experience. There, our bodies awaken sensory capacities that were only partially used within urban settings. In the stillness of a sparsely populated forest, light fills the retina; birdsong, the sound of foliage swaying in the wind, the scent of soil and plants, the uneven contours of the ground, and the temperature and humidity of the air touching the skin stimulate the body and trigger corresponding unconscious bodily responses.
 
Such a space, which activates the senses of the entire body, led one painter to seek a way to “narrow the distance” between himself and his subject. The method was not to pull the subject closer through a visual “close-up,” but to concentrate on the sensations of his own body. It was an attempt to grasp what he intended to paint not with the eyes but with the body. In other words, through brushstrokes that convey the body’s responses to stimuli penetrating and surrounding him, he sought to reduce—and ultimately erase—the distance between himself and the subject. He came to pursue a way of constructing the canvas centered on gestural brushwork that is most immediate and directly connected to bodily sensation.


Hyundoo Jung, Forest and Body_Mass, 2017, Oil on canvas, 193.9x130cm ©Hyundoo Jung

As a result, in the landscapes of 2016, when he still maintained a certain visual distance from the forest, forms such as birds, deer, and trees were depicted with relatively clear outlines. However, after he began painting through the language of the body, elements that explicitly indicated or described objects within the forest markedly decreased. Brushstrokes that moved immediately in response to sensations arising prior to conscious composition were freed from the function of expressing distance or form. They became faster, more repetitive, and simpler, eventually forming multiple planes, bands, and masses of color that structured the canvas.
 
His focus on bodily sensation also led the body itself to appear as a subject within the painting. In the three works of Forest and Body_Mass presented in this exhibition, abstracted human forms emerge. The various physical particles emitted by the forest seem to penetrate the body, altering its state and extending it beyond its own boundaries. Thus, the faces and heads of figures in the paintings sometimes overlap with the sky or mountains, touch rainbows, and become landscapes themselves; the sun and moon at times become the eyes of the figure.

Moreover, the bodies he paints do not possess independent flesh distinct from other parts of the canvas. His brushstrokes blur and disrupt the boundaries between body and landscape. Color planes and bands of varying widths, lengths, and directions simultaneously construct the canvas and the figure’s body, so that the entire surface becomes a single body—a large mass without a clear boundary between landscape and figure. Rather than a figure existing within the painting, the canvas itself becomes the figure.
 
In this way, landscapes and figures painted in the language of a body in communion with the forest overlap, mix, and exchange their forms and flesh, reborn as a new body—a “forest-body” composed of portraitized landscapes and landscape-ized portraits. His paintings trace a journey that reaches sensation of the body through the forest, and in turn reaches sensation of the forest through the body.

References