There’s a moment when nothing comes into sight. The scenes unwind before your eyes are somehow afterimages, that of phantoms. You look back and there they are, the scenes from your past in layers, running away from you into memory, out of reality. The visions in your mind are residual and vestigial. And you feel blinded. The canvas holds that sight which holds nothing. Then it leads onto the scenery in which the artist’s point of view reveals layer by layer with each stroke.

The Genesis of Point of View, Painting
Point of view is born where seeing starts. Take care to the word “point” in it because it means the spot in which seeing is being done, thus holding subjectivity rather than objectivity. You will detect no common theme or view in the works of the five artists this exhibition brought together; Hyeseung Lee, Hideastu Shiba, Ether, Jenny Cho, and Soojung Choi. Their pictorial arts are on their own, completely independent from the others. Their views criss-cross across reality and fantasy, inside and outside, formality and informality, creating new points of view. In light of this phenomenon, the title of the exhibition is a word-play, “Paint of View.”

Real-scenes and Unreal-scenes
The images yet to materialize are sinking down deep into memory. Hyeseung Lee and Hideastu Shiba’s pictorial arts bring those images to the present and to a standstill. Hyeseung Lee’s view in Norway on her trip, in Jeju Island where she grew up captures the vast and vibrant nature and puts on canvas with intuitive strokes. Intensity of wind, speed of water, flow of light, and size of earth form impressive atmosphere of the pictures without overt description. That is why her paintings lingers in sight but such emotional indicators are tactile.

With vertical perspective implemented on enormous 3-meters-high canvas, Hideastu Shiba’s paintings make viewers feel visual experience of being pulled into a forest. The human figures drawn in the space of enormity symbolize emptiness and loneliness, the symptoms of human alienation. The frame of his scenery resembles that of traditional landscape scenery but rather than reverence to nature, it has the metaphor for longing to reach unreachable nature. This is not unlike the eyes of modern men fixed on towering skyscrapers. The Tower, his incomplete work, reminds us of the Tower of Babel, the desire of men rendered incomplete for its excessiveness. This skyscraper of men’s unending desire captures the Sisyphean destiny and this world.

The Pictorial Impulse and Theatrical Reconstruction
The observation of existence and zeitgeist is reflected in stubborn experiments of materials in Ether’s paintings. After six months of self-cultivation(according to the artist), SITMEN series is about a hundred human figures caught in mid-pose neither sitting nor standing. Every single piece unlike the other is enumerated in encyclopedic juxtaposition, not with psychoanalytic logic of metamorphosis of ego. These paintings demonstrate impulses that cannot put into words or contexts and naked bodies of ignored sights.

Such pictorial impulse construct its phraseology in the works of Jenny Cho and Soojung Choi with theatrical set-up situation. Using photo relief technique, Jenny Cho toys with multi-dimensionality hidden behind perspective and then paints it on canvas. Here windows, curtains, doors, and all the other objects constituting the space hold onto their own dimensions, thus maximizing theatrical spatial sense. The point of view of Self and that of the Other intertwining and merging lead viewers to history of paintings and point of view. The sporadic montage of objects and incidents in Soojung Choi’s paintings create cosmic sensation with frames of infinity and numerical sequence such as Big Bang and Mobius Strip. Latest series of Minerals let all beings in space wrestle with multiple dimensions over structure of minerals. The structures, movements, and events of objects defying causal narrative play out simultaneously like experimental theatre. In these theatrical situation, the objects duck out of gazing viewers and try to escape out of canvas. In the end of this loud escape, objects converge into meticulously weaved frame of paintings, vibrating the spatial sense of paintings.

The recreated images are more surreal than scenes in real life for they too have colors, forms, structures, and even flesh of eye line. Eye line(artist or Self or the Other) you encounter following their brushstrokes opens new world, shattering muggy consciousness, almost makes you feel in communion. Flat canvas is where clandestine world begins between eyes. The more blurry the sight, the more resonating the secrecy. And the desire to see engraves eye line with hands. Thus, pictures are still mesmerizing.
- Somi Sim Curator, Gallery Skape

*image (left)
Hikers, 2012
Oil on canvas, 285x185cm
© Hideatsu Shiba
courtesy of the artist and Gallery Skape