Discovery of light
It is said that the artist attended a lecture named “concept class” when she studied abroad in France. It was the class to try every possible method to approach concepts chosen by students themselves.
She chose the concept of a chair. Unlike love or passion, it has a concrete signified that it would be fine for us to understand that she chose the object of a chair. The first thing she did was to paint a chair on a two dimension plan elaborately and realistically. She reasoned that she had to “observe the nature before giving any meaning.”

She tried truly various methods since the first approach of a realistic representation. “With the diminishing interest in painting similarly, … painting parts, giving variety to color, putting in background, changing materials, cutting painted works, sculpturing with thick wires, transforming forms this and that using computers…”

After several months of such trials, what she discovered was light. It was neither the definition of a chair nor the true nature of a chair. It was light which seems to be totally unrelated to a chair.

Light without shadow
The reason you call it discovery when you see light all the time is that the way of seeing light has changed. After the “concept class,” she began to see light from a different point of view from before - “Light without shadow.”

“Light without shadow” does not exist at least in the world now we are living. If it does, it will be so only at the level of a concept or logic.

Light and shadow is one of major elements of a pictorial expression. “Light without shadow” seems strange even in the world of painting. Light and shadow has white and black as its both ends. Being close to the white end, it gets brighter and to the black end, it gets darker. The light without shadow desires to go beyond the white end toward “white light” brighter than the brightest white in reality.

Light, time and space of remembrance
To be light, white color has been added thinly over and over from months to years. Every moment light is added every event she would have sensed, thought and imagined would have been memorized in her mind. Therefore, light become the time and space on which every remembrance is brought back.

A week passes painting. A month passes painting once more. The reason of the white light reaching to your heart with an unexplainable depth and intensity may be the years of repetition getting wet and getting dry. And it is going to be our joy and happiness putting our remembrance on the time and space opened by the white light bearing time.

Color, traces of remembrance
What disappeared was a chair when the “concept class” was over. It was an object and it was a form. A chair is in the artist’s view. Where is she looking at? Her eyes are zeroed in on the light on the chair. At the moment every event she would have sensed, thought and imagined is reduced into light like into a black hole. But the chair is not. An object or a form is not reduced into light but left behind as color.

Dr. Park Gallery Head Curator Kim Sung-Youl