After enduring the severe heat of summer and now confronting urban landscapes filled with hazy fine dust, the longing for clear nature feels more urgent than ever. Leeahn Gallery Seoul has planned a series of solo exhibitions by two young artists whose paintings focus on nature—particularly the “forest.” As the first of this series, 《Enchanting Forest》 presents primarily new works by Woohyun Shim from 2018, an artist noted for her vibrant, intense colors and dynamic brushwork, and welcomes audiences from November 1 to 24, 2018.

From ancestral burial grounds in Paju that she frequently visited during childhood to the hills behind her home that she enjoys visiting as an adult, the forest has been a source of artistic inspiration for the artist. The forest is a place that induces sensory experiences stimulating all five senses—colors, forms, and textures of plants, minerals, and animals; fresh scents; and various sounds lingering around the ears—while also drawing one into an ecstatic state through private emotional communion. There, she discovered the primordial vitality, an eros-driven impulse latent in untouched, primitive nature. This biological impulse transitions into a Romantic pathos, expanding into a cultural impulse through the creation of painting.

In other words, the act of layering paint onto the surface of the canvas is a process through which the vitality of various elements discovered in the forest passes through the artist’s psychological and emotional filters, becoming incarnated as another form of life and externalized as tangible entities resembling living, breathing particles. At this moment, the white space of the canvas itself becomes identified as a forest space, and the artist pivots swiftly in multiple directions with short, rapid brushstrokes, layering vivid colors to create a dense, stratified natural space. The canvas fills with manifestations of a lush forest accumulated from fragments that remain from, or have been filtered out of, the artist’s memories of sensory experiences in actual forests, becoming the site where her own secretive and enchanting forest is born.

At times, Shim’s pictorial space appears to realistically depict nameless undergrowth, blooming clusters of flowers, branches, soft soil, rough stone surfaces, insects, or amphibians found in forests. At other times, it reveals ambiguity, as if transforming forest imagery she experienced into illusory abstraction. As the artist herself defines it, this pictorial space represents the realm of the “outside (le dehors).” This outside refers to the visualization of deep mental states erupting from the unconscious, the subconscious, and intuition—beyond our conscious awareness—where life and death, chance, and chaos reside.

In this sense, the pictorial space created by the artist is not a specific forest but a neutral, potential space possessing the quality of non-place (non-lieu). A non-place does not signify the negation of place, but rather a space of overlapping trajectories—spaces capable of mutual substitution and compatibility (Marc Augé). Fragments of visual, tactile, and auditory experiences accumulated from various forests throughout the artist’s life burst forth from the depths of her unconscious with energetic force, entering and juxtaposing themselves impulsively across a single canvas. As the artist states, “I traverse the pictorial space as if walking through a forest,” explaining that the act of painting is a process of assigning a new, unique order to each canvas.

This non-placeness is accompanied by atemporality. Fragments of different temporal memories from various forests, unconsciously layered within the artist’s emotional and speculative flow, manifest as nonlinear temporality. The flow of time experienced in actual forests in the past and recent past becomes simultaneously interwoven within her pictorial space. It exists as a state of emptiness and infinity that is neither past nor present, or both at once—beyond measurement by the standards of real time. As viewers immerse themselves in this space, the temporality of the real world also disappears or is suspended.

The artist has stated that she wished to further emphasize her cheerful and lively personal sensibility in these new works. While her earlier works were densely filled with thick paint and deep tones, these new paintings employ lighter, more buoyant colors reminiscent of watercolor, allowing for spatial pauses and transparency. The atemporal pictorial space of non-place that she creates may be described as a transparent veil with a certain reflective quality. In other words, the artist’s sensory and psychological experiences of being captivated by the forest are projected onto the pictorial space and reflected back, functioning like a magical medium that entices the viewer. Are you prepared to be captivated by the aesthetic mystery of the transcendent forest space created by Woohyun Shim?
 
 
Sung Shinyoung

References

• 《매혹의 숲 (Enchanting Forest)》