Q. Your work feels deeply meditative and emotionally precise at the same time. How do you balance intuition with the highly controlled structure of your process?

A. For me, the “highly controlled structure” of my practice is like an open field — a space where intuition and emotion are free to move as they wish. I maintain a lifelong routine of beginning work early each morning. I love that moment of standing before the canvas as the first clear light of day filters through the studio window, untouched and still. In the cool air, I run my fingertips across yesterday’s palette — layer upon layer of color traces pressed into its surface — and begin mixing new colors, moving between states of consciousness and unconsciousness. I build up paint according to a set of consistent rules, then wait – for as long as it takes – for the surface to find its own stillness. This is a controlled world that demands patience, and it is a rigorous commitment I have made to myself.

Paradoxically, the moment this strict structure and its repetitive actions begin, my inner world enters a state of complete freedom and deep meditation. It is precisely because of the controlled boundaries of the canvas and the near-ritualistic regularity of the labor that I am able to intuitively catch the finest tremors of emotion moving within that space.

If I were to pick up a brush guided only by intuition, with no structure at all, the work would drown in emotional excess – or dissolve into fleeting traces. And if there were only control, with no emotion, it would amount to nothing more than a cold surface. The controlled structure is like the strict precepts observed by a practitioner of meditation; the layers of color that bloom within it are a meditative landscape in which my most intimate emotions gradually take on a form that can be sensed. These two pillars support one another, and together they sustain the balance of my entire practice.

Q. Color operates like a language in your paintings. Do certain emotions consistently lead you toward particular palettes, or does the meaning of color shift depending on the work?

A. For me, color is not a word with a fixed dictionary meaning. There is no fixed rule that a specific emotion must always lead to a specific palette. And yet it is precisely at that point that my project Color as Adjective begins — the work of connecting color and adjective words to build my own subjective color-word dictionary. That said, this dictionary is not a finished rulebook. It is a living record, one that is continually renewed according to the texture of emotion at any given moment.

If a “noun” is a solid, fixed thing that points to an object, then the Color as Adjective I work with is not a fixed entity but a shifting relationship — a subjective experience. This is why even the same “sorrow” or “serenity” cannot be expressed in the same color every time it appears on canvas. The texture of emotion moving between consciousness and unconsciousness is different at every moment.

In the Emotional Color Change series in particular, the adjective word tends to be decided before the color. The finest threads of emotional connection, intense turbulence, sudden anger, sorrow that sinks without end – I first capture the invisible amplitude of these emotions in language, and then color translates them into precise, layered strata. In the end, color is the most flexible language for honestly transposing the psychological spectrum of the inner world onto the surface of the painting.

Q. You dedicate fixed periods of time to mixing colors, layering paint, and allowing surfaces to rest. What role does time itself play in the emotional meaning of your work?

A. Since finishing my studies, I have worked almost every day without exception. Even on days when I have to go out, I begin a little work early in the morning before turning to anything else. The time I spend making and handling color is, for me, the most fulfilling part of the day.

Time, for me, is not simply something that passes, nor a static pause spent waiting for paint to dry. I work on several series simultaneously in the studio. The surfaces of the Sensory World series require more than a full day of deep drying before the paint settles into place; the Emotional Color Change canvases demand such concentrated focus that it is difficult to complete more than one or two small sections in a single day — because even within each small section, I must refine and layer the color three or four times.

While one canvas dries, my thinking does not stop. I sit quietly, turning color chips over in my fingers, working out the emotional palette for the next piece, or pursuing some other formal possibility with patient intensity. The sight of different series ripening in the studio at their own pace, each on its own schedule, resembles, in a way, the process by which my inner emotions mature simultaneously on different levels.

In the end, the process of mixing color and building up layers of paint is an act of accumulating – quietly, steadily – the finest invisible textures of emotion onto the canvas. Time, for me, is the most flexible and invisible material of all: the one that completes the density of feeling. It is within that physical time that the emotions of the inner world finally emerge in their most honest and perceptible form on the surface of the painting.

Q. What are your greatest inspirations or influences?

A. My greatest sources of inspiration are not to be found in grand or distant places. They rest on three everyday axes that sustain my life: a connection with nature, the rhythm of time, and philosophical reflection.

The first is the quiet dailiness of life in nature. Every morning I walk the countryside paths and fields with my dog. I take in with my whole body the zelkova and cherry trees in the courtyard, the sound of the stream flowing faithfully with each season, the moments when the density of the air and the transparency of the light shift almost imperceptibly. These daily walks are not simply rest — they are the time in which my visual and tactile senses are awakened and my inner perception is sharpened.

The second is music, which fills the air of the studio. Before standing before the canvas, or while mixing color, I listen deeply to jazz — musicians like Pat Metheny and Keith Jarrett. The melodies of jazz, which carry a highly disciplined inner order within their fluid, supple flow, lend a fine-grained breath and sense of rhythm to the process of building up layers of paint. Music is an outstanding medium for the process of transposing my emotions into color.

Finally, what gives firm structure to my intuitive sensibility is philosophical writing. In particular, the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty – his exploration of how the human body and its senses encounter the world – awakens me to the understanding that color is not a simple visual stimulus but a living sensation, experienced by the whole body.

The thinking of Markus Gabriel also provides deep support for the direction of my work. In his book The Power of Art, he defines art not as the simple act of producing beautiful objects, but as an “epistemological practice” and a form of “spiritual labor” in which the artist’s physical actions are joined to material substance. His view — that invisible emotions and thought cannot easily exist on their own, and must be given concrete form through the material context of paint and canvas — is a philosophical grounding for the way I work. His observation that a completed work is not a fixed noun, but carries within it the power to lead viewers, when standing before it, to trace backwards through the time and reflection the artist has traveled — this is, for me, the clearest articulation of why I insist on this slow, repetitive mode of practice.

Inspiration, then, is not a special shock that arrives from outside. It is the everyday itself — slowly rising within the nature I walk through each morning, within the music that fills the studio, within the traces of deep reflection.

Q. Some of your monochromatic works incorporate embossed words hidden beneath the surface. What draws you to the relationship between language and abstraction?

A. The works you are referring to are my Color as Adjective series, which I have been developing since 2012 — now more than 450 pieces. To understand this series, one must go back to the autumn of 2011, which was the most unexpected rupture of my life.

At that time, I lost someone deeply precious to me, and I lost language entirely. Words that could not be spoken – could not be made into language – drifted through my consciousness, and for a time I could not even feel the colors I had always worked with. It took several months before I could pick up a brush again. The way of speaking that I found — to bring back out into the world what could not be said in that silence — was this work. For me, it was the language I recovered after loss.

Week by week, I observe the finest textures of emotion moving between consciousness and unconsciousness, and I mix color accordingly. I apply the chosen color to the canvas, then attach laser-cut adjective words, and layer paint over them again and again. Once the paint has dried completely, I carefully remove the letters — and beneath the surface, a thin embossed text settles into place, like a hidden skeleton.

The reason I conceal such specific language beneath abstract color is this: if a “noun” is a solid thing that points to a definite object, then an “adjective” describes an unfixed state — a subjective experience. The text that emerges – through covering the letters with paint, then removing them – is not a loud declaration but a quiet whisper; not a conclusion but a question, trembling with uncertainty. Color is a record of how many countless and varied textures of language a single human’s emotions — having passed through the tunnel of silence — can unfold into.

Q. What do you hope viewers slow down enough to notice or feel when they see your work? Have you ever heard a response that has surprised you?

A. From a distance, my works might appear to be simple monochromes. But if a viewer stops, slows down, and moves closer, they will find the thin layers of paint built up countless times and the faint embossed letters hidden beneath the surface — in the Color as Adjective works — or the delicate boundaries where fields of color meet and layer — in the Emotional Color Change series. I hope viewers will take their time looking into those quiet strata and feel – beyond the visual – a tactile trembling of emotion.

Because my work begins in such an interior and subjective world, I once thought it would be difficult for others to find deep resonance in it. Yet I am often surprised when I encounter people who tell me they find themselves in complete agreement with a particular color-word pairing I have proposed — that it has brought them real comfort.

On the other hand, there are also viewers who find, in front of the work, a memory entirely different from the emotion I had in mind when I made it. I think of that as another form of language, drawn up from the well of each person’s own life and sensibility. The moment in which each viewer, in their own way, discovers their own hidden sense standing before the painting — that is the landscape of communication I truly hoped for.

Q. Korea has such a rich artistic history tied to materiality, process, and contemplation. In what ways has your cultural environment influenced your understanding of abstraction?

A. In the Korean artistic tradition, abstraction is not simply a visual methodology of omitting form or transforming objects. It is closer to an attitude and a spirit of thought – one that empties the inner self, seeks harmony with nature, and treats the act of making as a form of practice in itself. Having grown up and worked within this cultural soil, my understanding of abstraction is naturally and deeply connected to this spirituality. It is visible, above all, in the very manner of my work.

The materiality and process so central to Korean aesthetics manifest in my practice as an accumulation of time. The daily, rhythmic acts of mixing paint, building it up layer by layer, and waiting for it to dry — these are a form of practice, a kind of breathing. Where Western abstraction has often been a mode of releasing the artist’s intense energy outward, the abstraction I pursue is closer to the opposite: a process of refining the ego away through endless repetition and waiting, stepping back behind the surface of the painting.

The natural environment of Yangpyeong, where I live, has also been a profound influence. The colors of the earth shifting with each season, the trees in the courtyard, the irises and cornflowers blooming and fading along the walking path, the scent of acacia blossoms drifting across the fields below the mountain — taking all of this in with my whole body each day has led me to see color not as a fixed thing, but as the circulation of nature and the landscape of the interior. This is deeply connected to the Korean sense of the natural world — the feeling that human beings and nature are not separate.

In the end, my cultural environment is less a heritage I consciously set out to inherit than an air that has quietly permeated my whole way of living. The structure of my practice — inscribing the elusive textures of emotion in language, then covering them over with paint to render them as abstract painting — is, I believe, the result of a Korean mode of thought, one that transmits a greater resonance through silence and finds fullness only through emptying, speaking now in the language of contemporary abstraction.

Q. Much of contemporary culture rewards speed, yet your practice embraces patience, precision, and gradual transformation. Does your work intentionally resist the pace of these chaotic times?

A. I have no grand ambition to mount an “intentional resistance.” I simply walk steadily at my own pace, and I believe that art, at its core, requires time for deep reflection.

Contemporary culture pursues speed, and there are already many wonderful artists among my peers who give magnificent expression to that velocity. Why should I feel compelled to climb aboard that particular current?

The slow, gradual process of mixing color each morning, building up paint one layer at a time, and waiting weeks for the surface to find its own stability — this is my most natural and honest way of breathing. If my work can become a place where those living in this age might pause, collect themselves, and stand still for a moment, that would not be the result of resistance, but rather the natural consequence of my time in reflection finding its way to the viewer.

Q. You studied in Germany. Did living there have an impact on your creative process, and if so, how?

A. It had an enormous impact. The approximately ten years I spent in Germany were the period in which the firmest foundations of my current practice were formed.

Above all, my teacher, Professor Klaus Stümpel, was an artist of extraordinary seriousness and dedication. He showed me what it means to be an artist not through words, but through the way he lived. Wanting to honor the faith and warmth he showed toward my work, I threw myself into it day and night, producing more than 300 works during my time studying abroad.

The greatest legacy Germany left me is the rigorous, devoted attitude toward work that I absorbed in those years. Art is not a concept assembled in the mind. It is physical labor — a constant observation of oneself and the world, an embodiment of sensation through the whole body, and ultimately the act of pushing that honestly onto the canvas through the fingertips. My lifelong routine of rising early each morning, making color, and standing before the canvas is the continuation, to this day, of the purest sense of responsibility I learned as an artist in Germany.

Q. Is there anything else you would like to share?

A. This interview has been a very special experience for me. Moving through each question one by one, I was able to return — slowly and quietly — to why I reach for the mixing palette each morning, why I insist on such unhurried brushwork, and how color came to save me in the moment of the deepest loss of my life.
They say artists speak through their work. But I am deeply grateful for the attentive care behind these questions – which drew out the interior language of my practice with such depth. I hope that the adjectives hidden beneath my canvases may meet the unique emotions flowing through each viewer’s heart — and become a warm passage in which, for a little while, they are able to glimpse their own hidden room. Thank you.