Paper has the property of being crumpled and torn. Having chosen paper as the ground of her composition, the artist begins her work by first tearing her pseudo-canvas. The rectangular sheet is torn in different ways depending on the artist’s state of mind or condition, and with an intention to limit contingency, a certain state of irreversibility loses its qualification as a complete stage upon which composition may be placed.

Because it rejects the premise that a ground ought to carry, because the ground itself becomes a contingent performance, because what most draws the viewer’s gaze is the uneven edge of the torn paper, we must already here consider the specificity of Dasom Park’s practice. We must consider the character of a work in which the properties of paper enter the eye first, or in which those properties are fully exposed. Ordinarily, torn paper signifies a mistake, a post-paper situation, or the end of paper.

Torn paper is no longer paper. The back or the end of paper precedes the paper itself. It shows the end of paper prior to paper. The pseudo-canvas is broken, damaged, or twisted. The notion of a square frame is replaced by paper of all kinds of shapes, by paper already ruined. The back comes before the front; the conclusion precedes the beginning. The order of time and the logical sequence of before and after are twisted. Because it is paper, the sheet barely set against the wall will endure the artist’s delusion or confusion, or arbitrary staging, as it is. Such a working method was often possible and will remain possible even with canvas, yet the artist’s method is more extreme.

Since she does not permit her figures, forms, or images a solid ground, a firm support, or a safe background, such visualization insists upon a dizzying and jagged ground. This strategy—of confessing first a ground that is deliberately torn, closer to barely hanging on the wall than standing against it, of admitting defeat before even beginning—this incompetence may well be an appropriate and good way of turning one’s back on the world. Life is at once dying; a beginning is already seized by its end; recognition is no different from self-negation. One who continues to see this becomes attached not to nothingness but to death, result, and negation. Some have called this inversion of temporal order advance purchase or preemption.

A foreordained ending, a constantly forgotten yet guarded ending—rather than finally being helplessly struck by defeat and death, one calls it in oneself; one welcomes it with clear and bright eyes/mind before being struck down; one stages in advance the scene of one’s own absence, and thus enjoys it. The artist already knows such inversion. She seeks to deploy a strategy of “transformation that contains loss,” of continually confronting “death as ending,” and thereby of “not turning the moment of transformation into loss, of not being submerged in loss.” Continuous change and difference will ultimately stop at loss and death.

One who knows this does not humbly kneel before mortal truth nor place parentheses around it, but instead begins to play with it. In order not to be submerged in loss, one installs a stage adequate to submergence and enjoys the act there. The artist borrows a “methodology of dreams” to install a stage of imagination where “what she once believed joyfully collapses.” Through such a dream method, in which trivial dreams, flat images, and flattened signs combine and substitute for one another infinitely according to their internal logic, the artist endures and enjoys this world between a logic of reality cleared of death and loss and the truth of death and loss. It is not tragedy. The artist summons a stage where solid things “joyfully collapse.”

Even the color she favors is yellow. Yellow is a color of cheerfulness and affirmation. Yellow devoted to a joyful downfall. Though helplessly torn and clumsily hanging, it is nevertheless not tragic, nor melancholic, nor shabby—it suggests the possibility of a world. The method of dreams expels a reality protected by firm and solid things, subordinated to the order of ideas. Within structures of logic, order, or concepts, sensation malfunctions and seizes its own life.

One cannot read, see, or understand the “interior” of such a groping from the outset premised on failure, that refuses to make a ground to protect and sustain its images, figures, and forms. Our own “premises,” such as emotion, tragedy, moral lesson, prudence, or sentiment, will also be torn; and we must look at this “oil on paper,” in which important parts have all been ripped away from a single tattered sheet, in which forms resembling scraps found in a trash can seem to have been pasted together.

The humans appearing in the artist’s scenes all have their mouths open. The artist describes them as “like a lump with a hole,” and as “intended expressions of a moment intoxicated to the point of losing space and time and forgetting oneself.” A hole that has lost the function of a mouth, a hole detached from any attached role or function, appears simultaneously as a mouth. A mouth frozen at a climax, a mouth with emotion and desire removed, a mouth without lips. Though oil painting on torn paper, and though it attempts with effort to place itself back in position, so much has been lost that it becomes impossible to recover any totality or representational coherence; these “oil on paper” works bear titles such as In a Submarine, Between the Legs, Dining Room, Narrow Place, as if some story were about to begin.

The title may be a device meant to deceive us, who desperately try to read and are compelled to read. If we insist on seeing a person struck by a chair inside a submarine, a table before that person, and so on, then what are we to do with it? If we recognize a person sitting alone yet as if accompanied in a restaurant seemingly for solitary diners, what then emerges there? Titles that seem to induce narrative, and figures or forms so sparse that no story can be made at all, along with repeatedly appearing “people sitting on chairs”—that is all.
 
In 2018, the artist, who had been working with “oil on canvas,” gradually moves toward “oil on paper,” from the four-sided frame to an uneven ground. These paintings, drawn while taped to the wall with paper tape, are still being experimented with in terms of how they should be hung in exhibition spaces. Medium and form precede the artist. Even what little representational quality remained is almost disappearing. Even if she brings in the methodology of dreams as a suspension of reality, this dream is not the typical dream method in which recognizable signifiers combine and confront one another in unrecognizable ways.

This dream consists of partial images barely salvaged from crumpled and torn sheets discarded as waste. The desire/motivation behind such inept surfaces was the wish to see “a scene in which the body is transformed.” Yet can the artist properly explain the “logic” of her own work? These humans—indistinguishable from the chairs they sit on, rendered human by our desire to read them as such even if roughly drawn, wearing the same vacant expression that does not suit the situation, drawn stiffly or as if cut and pasted—these figures in transformation are indeed the protagonists of this scene.

We may look at it, but since no further process can occur beyond what we see, perhaps we can only analogize it to a dream we “know.” It is clear that the artist enjoys the condition of these cut off, collapsing, and deleted humans. As mentioned earlier, yellow provides that clue. There is no external reference, no citation, no memory to draw upon in understanding or appreciating her painting. We too, under conditions similar to the artist’s, become impo.

These figures and situations—seemingly left half-drawn, half-discovered, half-seen; confined within the flat plane; seeking to dismantle narrative, logic, and order; pushing the human body flat and impoverished like paper and preemptively seizing/claiming its disappearance; relocating rigid chairs and soft humans into an inseparable state—are, as said repeatedly, not dry, not melancholic, not tragic. This is an experiment, an erasure. It is an experiment in erasing the narratives and conditions that once guaranteed painting and the human.

References

• [비평] 명랑한 임포, 궁핍화의 전략
  [Critique] Cheerful Impo, Strategy of Impoverishment