Installation view of 《StillLife In DreamDreamDream》 (Artspace Boan, 2022) © GuNa

A Dream of Watching Myself Dream, A Time to See Again What I Believe I Saw

Park Jihyung (Curator, ThisWeekendRoom)

She said that she often dreams. She spends a long time contemplating how those dreams approach her and come to have meaning. GuNa seeks to understand her surroundings through a continuous practice of revisiting traces that have left marks somewhere within her. This is part of an effort to approach the people, events, and landscapes an individual encounters in ways that are as multilayered and free of prejudice as possible.

She questions whether the things experienced through the retina and skin have truly come to her, or whether they are merely passing will-o’-the-wisps. At the same time, she believes that even if the outward form of an object fades away, the fundamental properties of its source must remain somewhere.

Yet what might be called the substance beneath a smooth surface is, in fact, neither easily visible nor easily grasped. (Some might say that it never existed in the first place.) Nevertheless, the artist persistently digs into this opacity, and for this reason I sense a certain obsession and contradiction in her paintings and sculptures.

The dream that appears no fewer than three times in the title of the exhibition is never something tangible, yet it is a space-time of fiction and contradiction that can sometimes feel more vividly real than reality itself. The world seen through a dream is an afterimage of the unconscious rising from the body and mind, and therefore something that is at once closest to oneself and always beyond the realm of perception—blurred and distant.

In her solo exhibition 《StillLife In DreamDreamDream》, the artist creates forms by pursuing the attributes of dreams. Rather than seeking to obtain a shape with a single contour, this becomes an attitude of grasping at and embracing a shadow retreating into the distance, feeling one’s way around an amorphous mass.

The scenes she has selected are not things she saw clearly, but things on a monitor screen, behind a pane of glass, belonging to a person seen from behind, drawn by someone long ago, or located behind the curtain of a dream. In other words, they are ghost-like lives that she has seen, or believes she has seen.

The act of slowly ruminating over such fleeting experiences, which will quickly disappear once the darkness of night passes, overlaps with the attitude of still-life painting: looking at and gazing upon a single object in an attempt to read what lies beyond its exterior.

Installation view of 《StillLife In DreamDreamDream》 (Artspace Boan, 2022) © GuNa

Yet the forms she creates have imprecise and distorted edges, like landscapes seen in dreams. The objects the artist has persistently held onto become fragile beings, like husks emptied of their contents or thin, translucent veils, standing or sitting far back within the canvas. The same is true of the pale cast-like body pressed close against the floor. Has she then failed to grasp the foundations that constitute the world and let them slip away? Where did they go?

It is precisely at this paradoxical point of intersection that GuNa’s world emerges. The surfaces and masses we encounter in the exhibition space are by-products left behind after the fundamental values of the information she has acquired have escaped from the shells of images, become invisible, and subsequently been embodied within the artist’s own body.

In other words, drawing is less an attempt to externally reproduce what she has seen and felt than a process of inscription through which she internally digests inputs from the outside and engraves them throughout her peripheral nerves. In short, what is expressed functions more like an indicator that she has spent time contemplating the concepts or things-in-themselves she has adopted.

She also generally works with highly diluted paint, gradually pushing color into the canvas as if gently scooping away at its surface, or completes her works by layering transparent or fragile materials over thin frameworks. The production methods she consistently employs likewise reflect her focus on perceiving cell-like units that constitute a form, rather than the unity of a completed form, and on translating their movements.

I am reminded of the meaning of Paul Cézanne’s distorted apples. What matters is not the clarity or resemblance of the outward appearance itself. GuNa’s paintings and sculptures, which appear fragmented like shattered glass, are by no means weak or empty. On the contrary, their faintly manifest images paradoxically represent the dense and resilient layers of time and depth of thought that sustain what lies behind them.

We often forget how arbitrary and uncertain an act seeing can be. Things glimpsed in passing in cities or through media are quickly taken to be real. Human beings endlessly confuse whether what they see originates in the subject’s independent perception or has been acquired indirectly from someone else.

Yet even while wavering, GuNa continuously separates her own perception from the mixed stimuli of the outside world, weaving together pure images filtered through the sieve of her senses to complete a creased landscape. The forms born through this act of distancing enter into multivalent associations with one another, creating here a stage akin to a lucid dream in which both viewer and artist may reflect upon the environments surrounding them.

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