Beom: There were two periods when landscapes and figures coexisted within the same picture. The first was when figures or events from dreams appeared intermingled with real landscapes. Then, from around the end of 2015, my interest gradually shifted toward abandoned places in reality and the grasses growing within them. The second was the period after 2019, when I was transitioning from landscape painting to figure painting.
At that time, three strands existed simultaneously: works with figures in landscapes, works consisting only of landscapes, and figure-centered works. At present, I am continuing both more abstracted figure paintings and figure paintings that remain relatively close to representation.
LEE: When you paint based on dreams, I am curious how much of their content you reveal. Even if fragmented, dreams can still contain stories.
Beom: It depends on the work. Sometimes I feel that revealing the content helps the painting, while at other times I think it is better to keep it hidden. As you said, dreams can sometimes unfold like long narratives, while at other times only a very brief scene remains.
There are also cases when I remember only an atmosphere or sensation without any specific content, and these different elements can become mixed together and lead into a work. I may put a single dream into one painting, or overlap several dreams with similar directions to create a single image. A particular figure or object may also be separated from its original story and used almost like an independent image.
LEE: Since they are dreams, perhaps everything could even be contained within a single picture. After all, the paintings do not reproduce the contents of a dream exactly or turn them into a complete narrative, so rendering them within a single painting might allow for even greater imagination. But some of the works you have been showing seem to evoke the atmosphere of religious painting. Most of the paintings are also quite large. Have you preferred large-scale works since the beginning of your practice?
Beom: I did not consciously decide from the beginning that I should make large paintings. But as I continued working, the paintings gradually became larger. In fact, I found small paintings more difficult, and I rarely produced small works that I liked. So there were times when I painted on a large surface and then cut out only the sections I liked and re-stretched them as separate canvases.
I was often told that my early works looked like religious paintings. That was probably influenced by the environment around me. There was a monastery, a church, and a Buddhist temple near my home, and from childhood I naturally grew up hearing the temple bell at dawn, the church chimes in the late afternoon, and the sounds of Mass and hymns coming from the monastery in the evening. I never consciously thought much about it, but I think those atmospheres remained in my work without my realizing it. For the record, I do not practice any religion.
LEE: Whether landscapes or figures, many of your paintings are based on photographs. Do you select only photographs that you have taken yourself? And since the source images are not collected online but are photographs taken either by you or by people around you, I imagine that most of the figures who appear are people close to you.
When you explain your works, there are also many cases in which you were present in the situation depicted. Because of that, a strong sense of being there, at that particular time and place, seems to come through. This raises another question. To what extent do you think your own emotions or thoughts enter the work?
Beom: Some of the photographs are ones I took myself, and in the case of portraits, some were taken and sent to me by people around me. I may refer to images collected online, but it is difficult for them to become the starting point of a work. The image has to be of a place I actually passed through, people I was with, or a scene located within a very close radius of my own life before it can enter the painting.
That is why most of the figures are people around me. These are not extraordinary events but ordinary moments from everyday life, and perhaps for that very reason they remain with me longer. That does not mean I record those moments exactly as they were. As the work develops, memory and emotion intervene: some parts become blurred, while others grow stronger. So reality and memory, observation and imagination, are all mixed together in the work.
LEE: Quite a few artists working in painting or sculpture have told me that their work is moving toward abstraction. As we have been talking, I have come to feel that, in some respects, your attitude toward subject matter resembles that of painters working during the transition from the nineteenth century into the early twentieth century.
Beom: I think painters from that period were also trying to capture not simply an accurate depiction of the subject before their eyes, but things like the air or light of a particular moment, memory, and sensation. I am likewise more interested in the atmosphere that remains with me when I look back on a scene, or in the sensation that something was alive, than in the figure or landscape itself.
Because of that, the image may sometimes become blurred; certain parts remain while others disappear. Rather than saying that I am moving entirely toward abstraction, it feels closer to constantly moving back and forth between scenes from reality and hazy memories. I do not know whether my work will become more abstract in the future or move in a direction where figuration becomes more pronounced, but at the moment my paintings are in the process of searching for an order or structure that feels more desirable and convincing to me.
