My Beautiful Melancholy
I was striving to make the color for “positive” in 2012 when I launched the project Color as Adjective. I gave up in the end after several months of wrestling with this idea. It was an uncertain, gloomy, and dismal period when we did not know where our society was heading due to political scandals and candlelight vigils. Despite my relative isolation in my studio, I could not ignore these series of events. Positive and beautiful colors, the elemental factor of my work at the time, seemed like they were nearly unattainable due to my personal feelings. Words of affirmation and healing could not be represented with any color scheme. As a result, the majority of over 250 colors consisted of different shades of darkish gray with low saturation.
On a winter day in 2016 when dim sunlight was permeating through the studio’s windows, I noticed some color chips shining on a temporary wall I had set up. I felt beauty in that moment. The color chips arranged on the free-standing wall were fragments of dark, trivial, tough, and desperate colors. The beautiful color I had always longed for but could never grasp was by no means made with just one color! That seemed to be everything.
Being alive, per se, with a sensuous existence is a form of beauty even though we feel melancholic during life’s journey.
Drawing for Color as Adjective, Project in progress since 2012
I make my own colors, document their time, and determine them by intuition. The lumps of colors chronicled on paper along with time are expressions of the same feelings couched in adjectives. This record shows how an emotion couched in one word can be expressed in a wide array of colors.
Color as Adjective, Project in progress since 2012 (291 adjectives as of October 2018)
The colors determined by this project are painted in monochrome along with the characters for adjectives that appear embossed on the canvas. Most of the words are emotional and psychological. This series represents the emotions an individual feels in a rapidly changing environment as they react to such a change. This project demonstrates a combination of emotional language and color as a chronicler of the inner world in a moment of desire, expectation, and despair.
Painting Based on Color as Objective
Color as Adjective (CAA) works as a unit of the semantic system through pictorial experiments. Unfurling on a canvas, paper, or a wall, CAA forges a sense field through compositions such as intersections and unions, engendering another meaning structure in variously morphing contexts. The field of my realistic, sensuous meaning pertaining to abstract order is unfolded through the medium of CAA as indicated by the titles of works included in the series Writing in Color and Lines such as Despair Tower, Never-ending Expectation, Meaninglessness of Value, The Present apropos of Unforgettable Moment, At the Edge of the Frame, That Spring, and Not Yet. Diverse colors as adjectives and as a new formative style represent ambiguity in human emotions, portraying ever-changing phenomena in the world.
Lines
It was an autumn breeze at first. The breeze sensed by my fingers felt cool as if time was brushing past. The uncatchable sensation unfurls before my eyes the moment I view an empty canvas, drawing a curve like a meaningless world’s trajectory. Plural worlds are associated with one another as an emotion crosses another and then another in a sequence.
Not Yet
The colors I use are couched in the meanings of freestanding adjectives that were captured in the past at a certain moment. The relation between composed colors and atypical forms is like an incomplete statement on an abstract noun that cannot be clearly defined as of yet.
Painted
A randomly placed quadrilateral on a square piece of paper is a pictorial condition given to me. It has one side that remains open and is painted in a color that refers to a specific emotion. Quadrilaterals which vary in size and shape come to have incomplete structures and not yet painted colors of feelings. They are a metaphor for emotions that cannot be filled or overflow in an unfinished structure left on the ground.
The Mass (Die Masse)
I attempt to dissolve the limits of intentionally set colors and change the two-dimensional conditions of black and white, although in the same context as my 2016 series which represented unaccountable yet actually sensed complex emotions with masses of nine colors. Time and nature work as the impetus for such a change.
The Angular Mass (Die Eckige Masse)
One single emotion consists of a mass of different emotions. This drawing represents this idea with an angular mass featuring irregular angles and color compositions.
Absolute State / Horizontality
We tend to think we stand upright on Earth since we envision a horizontal line. There is, however, a gap between actual and imaginary horizons since the axis of the Earth is tilted at approximately 23.5 degrees. Paying heed to this fact, I draw a rectangle on paper and divide it using a diagonal line with an inclination of 23.5 degrees. I believe that it is possible to maintain a horizontal state of emotions—a peace of mind despite the Earth’s revolution and rotation—by filling the colors of mutually different emotions and diversely changing the angles of the rectangle.
I diversely blend words and colors with contrasting or similar connotations in the canvas. A process of shifting from one color to another is depicted with the space of 5 mm and a tilt of 23. 5 degrees. The fact that this slanted state is in an absolute horizontal state is underlined with emotional colors couched in two adjectives and repetitive color fields. Hard-edge in terms of form, this work uncovers the nature of imaginary colors not named yet and the reality of language and makes a foray into escaping the form of simple hard-edge.
The Matter of Color’s Meaning and Area Within Constraints
The plane of a white square is one of the diverse conditions on which a painting can exist. I picture another plane whose conditions are also restricted by a black pencil on a 35×35 cm flat surface. I experiment with how meanings and tension of colors conceptualized with adjectives can diversely change according to how areas varying in size contact one another on this space.
The Matter of Condition and Position in Painting
An experimental study on the genesis of color-form-meaning regarding the condition and position of painting which occurs in the form of titled senses.
2018, ⓒ Lee Kyong
Translated by ArtNText
