The sense of bewilderment I felt in 2011, when I passed by Ilmin Museum of Art near the Gwanghwamun crossroads, is still vivid. I remember the word “REALISM” hanging in enormous letters in the middle of the hectic city center. In my mind, realism was hastily sorted into two categories: political, formal. Even before seeing the exhibition, the title seemed to forcefully narrow and funnel Choi Gene Uk’s work into a single frame, yet I also thought it was a term far too broad. Though it appeared to be a clear declaration or proclamation, the word kept growing more ambiguous. What kind of realism is Choi Gene Uk’s realism? Why realism? The problem began with realism.

I stood at the center of the U-shaped space on the second floor of Ilmin Museum of Art. On the right wall hung Bukahyundong 1 and A Girl; on the facing wall were Prelude, Bukahyundong 2, Bukahyundong 3; and on the left wall, Mother and Son and Our Town. The gestalt of streets, buildings, buses, and figures—appearing and disappearing in repetition—approaches as an irregular, embodied experience of reality. It is the illusion that I have entered the painting, or that the painting has become reality. It is the kind of scene that brushes across the cornea without being fixed in focus: passing scenery, passing time, unconscious experience, moments in which my inner present and external reality cross and interleave without boundaries.

Like Cézanne’s landscapes and still lifes, composed in pursuit of the dual truth of change and essence, Choi Gene Uk’s paintings, too, construct a subject that trembles between what is seen and what is unseen, and make it a reality. His surfaces contain countless violations of time and space, countless clashes of color. Yet what is astonishingly real is that our way of relating to the world is precisely like this, and my way of recognizing myself is like this as well. In short, this is a phenomenological experience that encompasses both objects and consciousness, and is held within my body. Certainty about the visible world draws near to the world only when it begins to doubt that certainty. Choi Gene Uk’s realism moves continually farther away from certainty about the world, while remaining in ceaseless exchange with another kind of certainty. His studio paintings and self-portraits from the 1990s reduce fact to the realm of direct experience, yet show that this is a reality possessed and gripped by the painter’s sensibility. He calls this “emotional realism.”
 
If painting is an aesthetic elucidation of the world, then this world is too wide for me to interpret with certainty. Too vast. … I do not care whether my paintings are called realism or whether they cannot be, but I believe my paintings are more real than those of any realist. … I call my realism mysterious realism, or mysteriously scientific realism, or emotional realism, because it is a ‘realness’ that can be inevitably felt through the senses. (“If You Ask What My Painting Is,” July 8, 1990)
 
In two black-and-white self-portraits painted in 1992, the painter in the mirror looks at us. Borrowing the mirror, the painter signals his presence—his being-there—within the painted space. The painter who stood before the mirror was there; he is in the painting; and the viewer standing before the painting sees the world the painter saw. A somewhat intricate relationship forms among the painter, the painting, and the viewer, revolving around layers of reality. We each weave our own world from realities that are incidentally projected onto a screen like a mirror. In this sense, Choi Gene Uk’s emotional realism does not deal with the temporary suspension of a universal reality; it deals with the way reality exists within us. It relates to an unceasing exchange discovered between the micro-world of individual experience and the structure of the vast world. In this process, familiar objects suddenly become strange, and the universal aspect of an object rises into symbolic metaphor.
 
Choi Gene Uk’s landscapes presuppose the projection of self-consciousness through which the painter receives the external world. They are constructed spaces made by folding and unfolding the gaze in layers, and combinations of force and motion—touching, applying, and pressing the brush. His method of photographing first and then painting breaks down the simultaneity of real space, creating an unfamiliarity that comes from re-editing and re-arranging.

The 1991 work Returning from School 2 overlays multiple images atop an everyday scene; such contrasts become matters of causality, joy and sorrow, narrative, and the structure of the picture produces crossings of different times. What we discover through this is the tension produced by the collision of signifiers, and it is here that the formal dimension of emotional realism shifts into a historical context. The construction of the image, the selection of scenes, and the correspondences among pictorial elements mediate meaning, bringing his paintings to an emotionally grounded facticity.
 
This calls to mind a state in which the realism–modernism debate between Lukács and Brecht has arrived at a kind of convergence. Lukács argued that the realist is connected to both the individual’s experience and historical totality, and presents social facts through everyday details. Brecht, by contrast, maintained that such details require abstraction from individuals’ perspectives, and that through this one can grope toward ‘totality’; he explained that this totality emerges in the process by which images are constructed and reconstructed. In other words, the tension between modernism and realism becomes possible through quotation and metonymy between whole and part; in Choi Gene Uk’s case, this appears as the coexistence of painting’s expressive function and the period-specificity of meaning.

For example, in North Korea C/High-Line Park, the sequential juxtaposition of two opposing images is a contemporary dilemma in itself. Prior to ideological judgments such as capitalism versus communism, or environmental judgments such as nature versus artifice, it seems clear that our condition of existing within the reality of the present is a “middle point” between two worlds. He wrote as follows in the foreword to his 2009 solo exhibition:
 
A painting succeeds only when modernism and realism sustain a tense relationship; and the bodily tension at such a moment is precisely ‘Provisional-Government-ish.’ … But the dialectic of form and content in painting remains valid. Though it has been nearly severed since Cézanne, the combination of realism and modernism has to go farther, and the more a painting does so, the less it can be a familiar painting of the past. … The moment a painting looks ‘painterly’ is precisely the trap. (Foreword to the 10th solo exhibition 《The Provisional Government》, 2009)
 
“Provisional-Government-ish” is, in one sense, a description of content, but the series ‘Korean Tourists Fumbling in Front of the Provisional Government’ shows that it is something that becomes manifest through very concrete subjects. Between what an obvious historical fact like the Provisional Government signifies and the act of painting the actual sight of the building; and in the attitude of projecting onto it the incomplete aesthetic problem called realism versus modernism—form and content, history and the individual, become entwined as a totality. This is the process by which the painterly order that condenses the nineteenth-century shift in visual perception, Cézanne’s struggle toward essence, and the language of a painter living in contemporary Korean society come to combine within ‘emotional realism’; it forcefully problematizes, with dense immediacy, the critical dimension internal to modernism.
 
In the course of this process, the painter’s inner conflict sometimes spills into the painting. In Painting, What are You? and A Fluorescent Lamp, beneath a plane blacked out with paint remain traces of a painter, a book, someone’s back, and a fluorescent light. Choi Gene Uk says that black carries the meaning of ‘save me.’ In these dark paintings, the painter and the fluorescent light survive within darkness; through that light the painting becomes visible; it becomes the last trace of a painting erased into oblivion; and it summons the past that remains as painting.

The light in the painting does not emit light in a literal sense; rather, it remembers color, leaving brightness inside darkness. Courbet said he could not paint an angel because he had never seen one, but one cannot say that one cannot paint an angel seen in a painting. This concerns the possibility of painting: the power of painting to make the unseen visible ultimately returns to realism in a meaning opposite to Courbet’s. It is not the question of ‘is it visible,’ but the question of ‘can it be seen.’

Little by Little, which is also the title of his solo exhibition at Indipress in 2016, is a large-scale work depicting a funeral burial scene from a low vantage point. As a symbolic metaphor for political shifts in history, this work compels us to witness death made visible—death, that is, as the consciousness of death that is always absent as someone else’s. Standing below the retaining wall where the coffin is lowered, within a landscape conceptualized in intense color, we look upon a death.

Only those who have not died can witness death. In and out of this immense twilight where Minerva’s owl spreads its wings, we become the ones who remain. The capacity not only to look at what is visible but to make what remains visible is a virtue of painting that cannot be renewed by anything else. The recursive formal elements of art, spoken through the body, are nothing less than the moment the painter’s veins extend vividly across the surface. This is why the untrimmed grass and flower fields—nature as it is—pulse dazzlingly in My Life, My Teacher, and My Heaven (2004).

References

• [비평] 문제는 리얼리즘이다-최진욱의 리얼리즘
  [Critique] The Problem Is Realism – Choi Gene Uk’s Realism