Beyond their difficult portrayals of pain and respite—the artist’s
own figure in the throes of invisible, endogenous hurts—many artworks in 《Sheer Painer》 directly
measure Aatchim’s fine mobility during periods of changing physical wellness
over the past year. The painting Crude in Me (2023)
comes from one such episode; the rough outline of a blue-violet figure is left
open and undefined, instead washed in urgent layers of silver pigment.
“Sheer,”
meanwhile, a loose reference to British novelist C.S. Lewis’ Mere
Christianity, describes Aatchim’s vulnerability in portraying on
translucent silk such naked and intimate grief. “Sheer” also points to a kind
of consolidation or extremity in her latest work, an “amputation of frill and
limbs for my survival, and until only the core is left—the urgency of sharing
my first thoughts as raw drawings.”
《Sheer Painer》 is, in
brief, an epistolic study of suffering and healing, an anatomy of comfort and
discomfort that for Aatchim, like many others, offers prognoses hardly as
clear-cut. “The past,” writes sociologist Arthur W. Frank, “is remembered with
such arresting lucidity because it is not being experienced as past; the
illness experiences that are being told are unassimilated fragments that refuse
to become past, haunting the present.”
In one work, My
Cyclical—Sundowner's Chronicle (Still Life with Dayflowers from Fishers Island,
Rocket air blaster, Wire clipper, and a Nutcracker) (2023),
Aatchim inscribes the ekphratic refrain, “a sundowner… find me only in the
morning, midday wilt,” around a still-life of cut Asiatic dayflowers,
short-lived blooms that rarely last into the afternoon. In another
painting, Blessed to be Bruised; Self Portrait as Fragrance of a
Quince, (Winter in Seorae Maeul, Seoul) (2023), Aatchim hides a
bowl of yellow quinces at the far right of the canvas.
The fruits, rendered in
metallic copper and 24-karat gold pigment, are remembrances of a pair picked in
a hospital garden while awaiting surgery last winter. Though sweet smelling,
the fragile flesh of the yellow quince is bitterly tannic and easily bruised.
And yet, the more they bruise and blight, the more fragrant they become. Still
other symbols, allegories, epitaphs, and poetics of remission and deliverance
punctuate the grave bittersweetness that veils Aatchim’s 《Sheer Painer》.
