Artist Beom Jinyong captures on canvas the familiar surroundings we encounter in everyday life. These are mostly unremarkable natural landscapes: lush green forests overgrown with unnamed plants, quiet ponds sitting alone within them, or bleak winter fields laden with falling snow. At times, however, figures also appear standing or walking within these scenes.

Such figures may be people close to the artist or specific individuals captured in his photographs, yet in his paintings they are largely stripped of personal specificity and contextual associations, transformed instead into nameless presences that confront the viewer. They may aptly be described as “nameless landscapes and figures."


Beom Jinyong, Naong, 2021, Oil on canvas, 130 x 163 cm © Beom Jinyong

I. The Nameless Uncalled, the Nameless Called

The nameless is an existence without a name and, at the same time, an existence that is not called by name. Strictly speaking, however, a nameless being refers to a human subject or object for which an act of naming once took place in the past, but whose name is no longer invoked in the present. As poet Kim Chunsu wrote, “When I called his name / he came to me and became a flower,” a named being acquires semantic value only when it is called.

In this sense, the natural landscapes and figures in Beom Jinyong’s works are not so much instances in which he gives names to the nameless as they are beings summoned while remaining nameless, as though called simply “someone” or “something.” In other words, they are “beings called forth as nameless by the artist.”

This is a paradox. The subjects of Beom Jinyong’s paintings acquire semantic value not because they are “called as named beings,” but precisely because they are “called as nameless beings.” His artist statement offers further insight:

“I have painted the vitality of nameless grasses growing in everyday landscapes that no one pays attention to, or in abandoned places. These grasses are not, in reality, magnificent or extraordinary. They are torn, trampled, tangled with one another, and wither away. And yet, whenever the seasons return, they invariably grow again. No one wants them, nor do they want anyone.

They simply stand where they are, as though it were the most natural thing in the world. Their indifferent yet dignified vitality burns and scatters in the air. They exist everywhere, but unless one looks closely, they cannot be seen anywhere. I amplify these landscapes on canvas, bringing them vividly to the surface as though they could be touched. Recently, I have been painting everyday landscapes and people around me who can no longer return.”

Indeed, the natural landscapes and figures that Beom Jinyong invites into his paintings are called forth as a nameless plurality, like the “nameless grasses” described in his artist statement. Existing not at the center but at the margins, they retain semantic value precisely by being called collectively and anonymously through demonstrative pronouns such as “those things” or “those people,” in forms that are unexceptional or utterly commonplace. What, then, is the semantic value carried by these natural landscapes and figures as indeterminate aesthetic subjects in his work?

In his works, the “nameless grasses” are insignificant beings that exist everywhere yet whose meaning is difficult to discover unless one looks closely or calls them forth. At the same time, however, they are living beings that “scatter their indifferent yet dignified vitality,” and nature itself as a matrix endowed with intense life force.

Likewise, the nameless figures appearing in his works may seem outwardly unremarkable, yet in essence they become subjects of resilient vitality who, like the masses or the people, propel the course of history.


Beom Jinyong, Snow Day, 2019, Oil on canvas, 193 x 97 cm x (2) © Beom Jinyong

II. Vitality Drawn Forth through an Expressionism of Neutrality

Expressionist visual language is particularly well suited to capturing the writhing vitality of the “nameless natural objects and human subjects” summoned into his works. His method of mixing paint by applying it to the canvas and dragging it across the surface, using the canvas itself like a palette, together with vigorous brushstrokes that move freely in every direction and dissolve the boundaries between objects, actively draws chance out of an unplanned mode of painting and thereby intensifies the language of Expressionism.

What is the language of Expressionism? It is a subjective language that manifests inner emotions such as libido. Is libido not the boundless psychic energy arising from the id, represented above all by sexual desire? Accordingly, the ethics and institutions of modern society, constructed through the suppression of instinct—an “existence that resists control”—as well as rationalized systems of order within art, become objects of negation and dismantling in Beom Jinyong’s artistic practice, which employs an Expressionist language.

Through this language, he dismantles structured forms and narratives in order to construct another kind of order. In other words, through an Expressionist language that advocates an “order within disorder,” he simultaneously deconstructs the narratives of everyday life and reorganizes the grammar of his own artistic world.

In his paintings, Expressionist brushwork that actively exploits the slow-drying materiality of oil paint, together with spontaneous and improvisational strokes produced through rapid, energetic handling of the brush, visually breaks down the boundaries between objects, or between objects and figures, while preemptively dismantling any narrative that might form between them. In doing so, he allows viewers to set aside verbal explanations and semantics and concentrate fully on the aesthetic objects captured by vision itself.

Consider the works. In Naong (2021), a figure dressed in white walks against a forest or garden densely filled with rough Expressionist brushwork and thick impasto, while Mrs. Geumja (2021) depicts a figure standing before an enormous plant laden with viscous green paint, with sketch lines left intermittently visible as though the work were an unfinished drawing.

As their titles suggest, these works may lead viewers to trace Beom Jinyong himself or a woman named “Geumja,” yet any attempt to identify them as specific individuals soon fails. This is because Beom Jinyong is not particularly interested in conveying the message of his painting through the identity of a specific person.

Although each figure is an individual and is, to some extent, called or referred to by what resembles a real name, the figures are treated either as part of the landscape, assimilated into nature, or effectively rendered anonymous. Their ambiguously or vaguely depicted facial features further erase the significance of specific identity and contribute to an emphasis on anonymity and namelessness.

Consider also A Flower Bed of Crows (2020), which captures the backs and profiles of three figures dressed in black standing in a flower garden whose background is formed by free and spontaneous brushstrokes resembling hastily scrawled text. The work suggests the ominous signs of some impending event, yet it readily resists any attempt to grasp a narrative beyond the vague tension created by the separation between figures and background.

Likewise, Snow Day (2020), which depicts livestock resembling black goats wandering through the yard of a quiet rural house amid falling snow, presents a tense pictorial surface through broad brushstrokes and Expressionist language, yet does not convey any particular narrative beyond the modest scenery of everyday life.

What demands our attention in his work, then, is not a particular narrative, but rather Beom Jinyong’s Expressionist language of neutrality, through which he invests ordinary everyday subjects with emotion. An “Expressionism of neutrality that invests objects with emotion”?

Unlike other forms of Expressionist language that rely on unstable compositions, dazzling colors, excessive spontaneity, and distortion, his practice slowly projects emotion onto its subjects through a comparatively restrained Expressionist vocabulary: everyday aesthetic objects, intermediate tonalities with little opposition between complementary colors, and impasto that remains relatively subdued despite the freedom of the brushwork. From these subjects, he draws forth a resilient vitality.

Consider the works. Forest (2015), composed of two joined canvases depicting a natural landscape at the height of a lush green summer, and Landscape (2018), which portrays a forest with a small pond during the same season, are representative examples of this Expressionism of neutrality. These are ordinary natural landscapes from everyday life, devoid of any particular narrative, yet Beom projects his own emotions onto them and renders them on canvas through a relatively calm “Expressionism of neutrality,” despite the viscous materiality of the paint.


Beom Jinyong, Landscape, 2017, Oil on canvas, 65 x 91 cm x (42) © Beom Jinyong

III. Epilogue

Artist Beom Jinyong projects his emotions onto nameless natural landscapes and figures encountered in the indeterminate realm of everyday life, drawing them onto his canvas. The restrained mode of Expressionism that I have termed an “Expressionism of Neutrality” serves as a mechanism that further intensifies the vitality of nature he draws forth from ordinary, unspecified surroundings.

This resilient vitality of “movement within stillness,” drawn from commonplace beings characterized above all by their namelessness, appears to constitute one of the central concerns of his practice. It will be particularly intriguing to see how this Expressionist language of neutrality will intersect with an aesthetics of life grounded in movement within stillness in his forthcoming exploration of still life.

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