Kho, Chung-Hwan, Art Critic
(Translated by J. Yeon Lee)
The dice are cast. Some of them are still floating in the air, and some others are swaying with one edge standing on the table. Watching Do Min's paintings of them, we could feel an extremely tense atmosphere of the decisive moment just before they hit the floor and give us a number, the indicator of our luck. Will the Goddess of fortune smile at us or just look away? Could we hit the jackpot or nothing at all? Do Min captures this pressing moment and fills his canvas with the fatalist and ontological tensions.
According to Sigmund Freud, human beings are animals of desire, slaves of libido, the completely blind desire which is utterly beyond control. As the desire is suppressed by institutions (or institutionalized consciousness), it hardly shows itself in ordinary times. Even with the suppressions, however, the desire eventually fulfills its need when it has a chance to do (the return of the suppressed). The life of Dostoevskii offers us one good example of the self-realization of this uncontrollable desire. We know Dostoevskii as a famous writer but he also was very well known as a compulsive gambler. He is known to have been usually paid his manuscript fee in advance even when he had not started writing yet, squandered the money away for gambling, and written novels to pay the debts. Eventually, it was the bad habit of gambling which kept him writing. Gambling pushed the writer to the hopeless moment of life, and the consciousness of existential crisis made him write novels. In the end, we could say that what mattered to him was not the gambling itself, but the crisis it created for him to work. Without the crisis, therefore, his books could not have been written. Like this, desire has two faces. It drives a being up to the cliff of despair, and pushes it to overcome the critical situation at the same time. In other words, desire could be the incitement of creative activities.
Dice and casino chips in Do Min's paintings are the symbols of fortune or destiny. They are related to the theme of his earlier works where he mainly dealt with the problem of desire in that the both works are speaking of good luck and fate. In a work, for example, he was showing a fork and an expensive high heel display in a showcase as symbols of human desire. Here, especially, the sharp edges of fork represent the overt aggressiveness of desire.
With images showing reflections on the surface of water, so-called 'the landscape-like images', Do Min also speaks of the human desire. The vivid colors of neon light from some amusement quarters reflected on the wet asphalt road symbolizes the seduction of desire. What is painted on the canvas is a counter image because it is representing what was projected on the water. Here, to catch the particular feel of material, the asphalt, Do Min put several pieces of paper mulberry one over another on the canvas and pressed them down. After creating the uneven surface like this, he started painting on them. The result could remind us of a painting done by a Pointillist because the light reflected on this delicate and irregular surface has a special effect. It gives an illusion as if the 'rough points' of the canvas themselves give out the light. Sometimes the images are blurred and distorted as some water drops fall onto the surface of asphalt and start a water ring. With the reflections distorted and inverted like this, it seems like that Do Min tries to expose the true nature of desire, which lacks the reality.
After the works of reflected images, Do Min changed the subject matters into dice and casino chips, which became the trademark of his paintings. Using the dice and chips, the artist tries to speak of the good luck in life and fortune. Moreover, to emphasize the double-faced nature and duplicity of luck and fate, he introduces Janus, the two-faced figure of the ancient greek mythology.
Therefore, Do Min's paintings, naturally, met the common subject matters which are related to the fortune such as the paintings and sculptures of pig and gold foil. While the subjects have decisive meanings which are considered to bring the good luck to people, a die is completely open to the two opposite meanings, good and bad luck, because it could bring them both. This is why Do Min pays a special attention to the dice. Because of the two faces and duplicity it has, it could become a common symbol of life itself. This is the keyword with which we can understand Do Min's paintings.
The symbolic devices are found throughout his painting works. First of all, the most prominent ones are the twofold images or repeated reflections. Using the nature of glass or mirror which reflects the outside images, the artist makes some special effect: the images of dice and chips painted on them have their own inverted reflections. The result is that the same images are repeated on a canvas and the canvas is divided into two spaces: upper side and lower side, representations and their own reflections. Here, the reflected images of dice and chips are blurred and unclear, which makes a contrast to the original representations of them, the images of the upper side. It seems clear that the contrast between the real and virtual images aims to show the duplicity of fortune and misfortune.
Furthermore, the black and white backdrops of Do Min's paintings have also to do with the dual faces of life, its light and dark side. In addition, the theme of duplicity is found from the contrast between the clearly painted dice and the unfocused representation of chips which barely show their outer shape.
Above all, the symbolic meaning of Janus-like duality of Do Min's painting comes from the nature of the die itself. As we all know, a die has six faces and each of them has a number. The number inscribed in one face makes seven, a lucky number, when it is added to the other number on the opposite site without no exception. How is this possible? From the first, the die was made as a symbol of good luck. However, there is one condition for it to mean the good fortune: the number on the upside face should be added to the other one on the opposite side. This could be read as a magic spell which tells us that we can foretell the fortune of an object only if we see the two sides. Like this, the hidden meaning of the numbers on dice naturally leads us to the reading the backside of a thing or a being, and reading between the lines.
Do Min's works of the dice, the symbols of luck, emphasize and maximize their symbolic meaning. In a work where he makes a square with 9 dice, he also creates an emoticon-like double image of a traditional Korean lucky bag using the white dots inscribed on the surface of dice (the ones which indicate a number). Here, the meaning of fortune implied in dice is multiplied.
Do Min's paintings are usually categorized into the contemporary photorealism tendency. Their physical traits and feel of material have a lot to do with the genre of photography rather than with painting. For example, he uses photography's own visual techniques such as zooming and focus manipulation to make special effects like blurring of images. Moreover, he creates an illusion of depth on the two dimensional space of canvas by making the central part of it clear and focused while blurring the edges. The images of dice are clear enough by themselves but the clarity is intensified by the layer of transparent epoxy resin put onto them. The dice Do Min uses as subject matters of his paintings are exclusively used for roulette games. They are made of bright orange colored transparent epoxy resin. By putting the layer of epoxy, the same material used for the original objects, over the painted images of dice, the artist wants to give a life-like, or the photo-like, effect to his work.
Do Min's paintings showing dice and casino tokens draw the viewer's attention to the existential and ontological conditions of life, with the themes of desire, fortune, and fate. The works make us keep in mind that the fortune itself belongs to the undecided field which is open to the chance and possibility. The structure of undecided and open meanings of his paintings reveals the common symbol of the duplicity and dual faces of our life.
