Filling, Heaping, and Flowing

“I can still see yellow, blue, and green. White disappears and is often confused with gray. Red has vanished completely from my eyesight. I am being treated now and hope to recover my eyesight so I can see such great hues like the colors brightly glittering in a poem and the colors that bear such beautiful names in numerous different languages. I want to live in the world of such hues.” – Seven Nights by Jorse Luis Borges

Jorge Luis Borges speaks about the world of darkness he faced after losing his eyesight. He remarks that the loss of his eyesight is hereditary, but it is his own personal courage, not anything he inherited through genetics, that accounts for his unwillingness to give in to this world of darkness. Although he becomes unable to sense substantial images, he remains intent on language itself, relying on his own memories. This suggests that all artistic activities are indeed perpetual and longstanding. As he mentioned, losing eyesight is just another way of life. I would like to start this essay from the premise that losing eyesight is not falling into a world of complete darkness, but instead, entering a new world that can still be filled with extraordinary colors.

The theme and object of Lee Kyong’s work is color, which is also the world she lives in. For the artist, colors are perhaps more than just tools. Lee recorded 140 colors in a book, Writing Colors that she made while studying in Germany in 2000. The color names, which are non-systematic, subjective, and illogical, become a guide for me to analyze her work.

Writing Colors, which at times appears illogical, sometimes emotional, and even a bit over-sentimental, begins with a dull color (1), moves through a vivid hue (78), and ends with a sensitive color (140). 20 colors are written on one page of this book, in Korean on the left and in German on the right. The arrangements of the figures are of no significance, but one color leads another hue to emerge, which is quite similar to the process of completing her color-strip painting. Writing Colors can be interpreted as an extended drawing, suggesting Lee’s subjective, unconscious use of colors much like the process of automatism, and in addition reveals her own color classification method.

1. Filling

In her process, Lee Kyong purchases duct tape at Bangsan market. Her work begins when she cuts the tape into various sizes. She generates the first space by priming the canvas and applying these pieces of tape. The color strips usually begin from one end, but sometimes start from the middle. Lee fills the horizontally long areas with intermediate acrylic tints, applying them at least three to seven times. This process of applying paints is the “period of maturation,” demonstrating the layering of time. Lee creates another space after completing one color strip, which acts as a departure point. One color strip seems to be closely linked to another and the palette she employs shows a subtle difference among hues. In White Picture, for instance, the color difference among the strips is so minute and subtle that it cannot easily be sensed. Upon closer examination, however, we may find delicate differences. Bluish or yellowish tones unveil their differences between the whitish, yet not purely white hues. The color strips are filled with extremely sensuous, temporal, and spatial experiences implying the passage of time and the transformation of consciousness.

When completed, Lee Kyong’s color strips form a pattern of layers. After completing one space, she moves to another, as if spreading over the folded surface of the world. Lee’s painting can be said to an aggregation of space and time that has been extracted from her subjective experience shown through continuously unfolding color strips.

2. Heaping

Heaping refers to accumulation. Lee’s painting is contained to a horizontal order, but her color-strip picture is set up vertically, turning the strips into the layers of time and space. This verticality, however, is distinguished from any symbolic meaning of the vertical form and is not a reference to an ascent or upward direction. Stratification refers to the division of something into layers, all of which have some thickness. As if the land we are standing on is made up of several layers, the sky can also be composed of a group of layers.

Heaping something can also be interpreted as an act of construction. Gilles Deleuze frequently argues that stratification is a reflection of relationships between depth and surface. His stratification refers to accumulation. It is not a metaphor for height, scale, power, or divinity, but a remark about the surface of what we see, signifying that each surface has its own depth. Deleuze’s stratification refers to a temporal and spatial depth, which hints at the logic behind acts of incessant production. This being said, Lee’s layers can be seen as landscapes with thickness.

Landscapes are made by re-territorialization. If the Garden of Eden replaces Heaven in Christian culture, the space is an archetype of a consciously sectioned landscape. Landscapes are one of the materials forming nature, replacing the view of the world. The painter places nature in a canvas, as an act of visualizing and territorializing the world. The artist, by nature, is one who creates his or her own world, and Lee makes her own world through an act of painting. At this point let us consider Deleuze’s thought. Art is made from an incident, he stated. The audience often has a dual standard when seeing paintings with no form and representation. One is an attitude to analyze undecipherable subjective color and form in an emotional manner, and the other is to interpret nature or landscape in abstraction, because everyone once experiences painting during his or her life.

3. Flowing: Folding and Unfolding

Lee Kyong’s painting can be associated with a stream, having the attraction of ann endlessly meandering river. When seeing a river or the sea, we measure its depth and the color of its surface, responding to its movement. Unceasingly flowing, rhythmic water is the movement of life. Like the never-ending flow of water, Lee’s color strip painting streams with its own rhythm. The act of doing a painting and viewing the world as an artist is, in some sense, is an act of unfolding a folded world and again folding a world which was once unfolded. Lee’s work seems to be a personal representation of this process of unfolding and folding.

On display at the exhibition are her flowing and heaping paintings composed of horizontal color strips. The continuous attractiveness and plasticity of the color strips is formed through homogeneous force and tonality that doesn’t reveal any expressive elements or emotional unstableness. Her infatuation with water painting while in Germany is the precursor to plasticity of her current work. Quite expressive, her water paintings give a feel of both swirling and falling and appear somewhat unstable. This can perhaps be attributed to the artist’s fear of water. Despite this difference, a sense of the movement also appears in her recent color strip work. This sense of flowing motion, like the successive spread of wrinkles, excludes all emotions, much like in Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase.

4. The Re-territorialization of Experience

A description of landscapes often appears in novels by Kim Hoon. His description is paradoxical since a landscape has its own order, apart from specific occurrences. Kim wrote, “A rainbow of light stands out when sunlight seeps through the floating snow dust. A line of light is shattered by the wind blowing over the steep wall of a castle. Soldiers’ eyes are dazzled by the light.” Even amid the tension in battle, nature presents a splendid rainbow. The scenic quality in Lee’s painting is an inevitable element and is readily apparent, but her work should not just be considered a landscape. That is an aphorism that cannot be free from an scenic impression, but her work is not a landscape. Like the scenery of Kim Hoon’s novel, nature appears apathetic and presents just a spectacle.

Lee does not represent landscapes, but the basis of her subjective perception is obviously the spectacles of nature. The spectacles she sensed are analogous to the world of colors Borges witnessed, rather than a mystic illusion. The combination of color strips Lee rendered can be interpreted as the “re-terrtorialization of experience”, rather than the “representation of experience”.

In closing, I would like to examine her work, Transparent Painting. By-products from the process of making her work often left behind. These are the color areas of the masking tape that are to be thrown away. Lee rearranges these pieces on a transparent, acrylic plate. I consider occasional color (41), transparent color (52), intermediate color (121), and shattered color (131) in her Writing Colors rearranged like this.

Transparent Painting lies in a transition phase, moving from filling and piling to the rearrangement of surplus materials on a new space, which expands far beyond the act of painting alone. She brings Transparent Painting to the state of perfection as if casually playing with her own hands, as opposed to trying to delicately and meticulously observe her own stream of consciousness. Such shattering and extemporaneousness are acts of deconstructing the framework that the artist made for herself and marks the beginning of a process of deviation from her own established rules and norms.

JUNG HYUN (Art Critic)