Recently Suh Youngson is very active in producing paintings. It is possibly because he retired from teaching and now enjoys more freedom. Anyhow, he is expanding his eyes as an artist, frequently travelling the United States, China and Japan back and forth. Yet, the objects with his gaze on and the subjects in his focus are still affairs of ordinary people. A variety of scenes made by people in the world, if I may call it this way. Suh constantly speaks about his interests in people.

Is there a single thing that is done by a human yet not political? The same applies to Suh Youngson’s works. Suh turns his eyes here and there, and they become art works, implying some political messages to us. Maybe the messages themselves don’t maintain specific political motivation. However, the people and the cities that he painted, or the scenes – the mixture of people and cities - have power to catch our own eyes. They are also full of suggestions as if they wanted to deliver certain political messages, albeit unclear ones, to us.

The artist who used to show stark and mechanical urban scenes, and create historical and political scenes related to King Danjong, now turns his eyes to overseas. He paints the people and scenes of specific places that he stays in to produce art pieces, and by doing so, he displays much deeper and varied gazes. The scenes in his paintings, for example, the cafes, streets and subways in Manhattan, New York, are very political. Manhattan, a city of capitalism in the extreme, is a spectacle urban area with both illusion and existence, where people from everywhere gather and dream all sorts of dreams, and it is thus full of desire. The scenes of Berlin, which holds significance to us as a symbol of division, are no less political. It is an urban area with history and politics of which the division between the east and the west, and the subsequent control and suppression are still fresh in our memories.

There’s no way for us to know if the artist has any political views or beliefs. And we don’t need to. Notwithstanding, we can ask questions to ourselves when we face his works. Different regions, cultures and emotions maybe. But the faces of various lives of people who carry their daily lives in each city, or even subway stations and buildings of division have faces that have been together with the history. Suh tries to depict these faces with painting. The people and scenes that he looked at as an alien are not just objects of his interests. They contain politics of existence and history. And the artist wants these to be implied in his paintings. Hence, Suh’s works are of the humanities. He talks about the humanities not with language but with visual images. The narratives are, in the end, the artist’s gaze upon “humans.”
Everything including institution, custom, borders, cities, production and consumption forms the scenes of the time, but the subject is always “humans.” From this perspective as well, Suh’s paintings are very much of the humanities.

At the same time, it is his own gaze into “himself.” A series of his self-portraits including , is the process to show that the artist is also a part of the “humans.” Thus, there is heightened tension between the external and internal, surrounding his identity as an artist. He is described like a beast with expressionistic tradition and sentiment, and it is a strategy to maximize this collision and tension. Perhaps he is throwing the ultimate and fatalistic question to himself as a painter - “What is it to paint?” And there’s no answer to all of these. We are only to live in a reality of existence and situation. Whether it is New York, Berlin or Seoul, there’s just a slight difference in existence and situation. We eat in restaurants, drink tea in cafes, buy cakes and take subways to home. As we are not aware of the politics in such scenes, another day passes by and tomorrow that is just like today comes.

Chung Youngmok
Ph D. Professor, Seoul National University