Note

Flowers Everywhere

It is said that falling in love is a very brief moment of emotion.The moment I look at a picture, my eyes light up and I feel great joy. (However, when meeting a dating partner, I decide whether I like or dislike the person within the first second of meeting).The term "eyes light up" is am biguous. It could be the excitement of unfamiliarity; it could be genetically engraved gratification for rich color and comfortable form - things with visual characteristics that are beneficial to survival or it could be heavy or light form and color that affects the mood. In a painting, materials, movements, and time are combined on a flat screen to meet the eyes of the beholder. It's a story that's told purely through visuals, but when it comes to critiquing a painting, phrases such as "too decorative" or "overly pretty" are often used. Pictures are pleasing the eye in many ways, but if you say that it was designed to be pleasing to the eye, it will be judged as being a little light hearted. The title of this exhibition, <Flowers Everywhere>is used as an expression of contempt for "things that are superficially pretty".But I like flowers because they’re beautiful. How beautiful are flower gardens that are planted for the sole purpose of pleasing the eyes.

People use the term "picturesque" to describe beautiful scenes. If there is something that I see that is good to look at, I immediately want to make it into a painting. This also means that I want to own it. I look at the pictures and collect interesting colors. This is a way to make colors that I like my own and to use them as material for paintings in the future. If a writer has an extensive vocabulary, he/she can express himself/herself more abundantly. Without words that describe emotions, we wouldn't be able to feel any emotions from reading words. For example, the word ‘enjoyment’ may have no meaning as it can have a variety of meanings. If you only know the word “pleasure,” you will not be able to distinguish the subtle and varied sensations similar to pleasure.In cultures that have a wide number of words for different colors, they sometimes have a more profound sense of colors. (This is true even if the before and after relationship changes.)I expand my range of colors like a writer expands his/her vocabulary.

「Color Collection」is a painting that quickly transfers the proportions and positions of colors in paintings that I have liked to a small piece of paper. Colors differ depending on which color is next to which color, at what proportion, and where. The lines drawn with the compass prevent the hand from creating intentional shapes. Here, the lines help to guide the eyes, and the shape of the rounded lines drawn with the compass makes the eyes feel uncomfortable. In other words, the shape of the color plane and the shape of the lines have been minimized to the extent that they help to express the color without indicating their own meaning.

In a solo exhibition called 'Colored Lenses' held in 2018, I chose colors through 「Color Collection」 and collected superficial images that are rapidly visually stimulating, and composed the entire screen by combining images, colors, and brush strokes on the screen. When I put the images on the canvas, order emerged. In the new works in this year's exhibition, I have reversed this process. I have brought order as a material for the painting. If painting is to collect the energy of a disorderly world and create a world of rules in a canvas frame, now, in the process of painting the orderly world based on rules as the material of the painting, the rules are broken, preciseness disappears, and gaps are formed. I folded the colored paper in half and folded it in half again and cut out the shape as my hand went. When unfolding the paper, 4 repetitive symmetrical patterns appear. These pieces of colored paper are the material for my painting. But is this really symmetrical and repeatable? I can't create mechanical symmetry for various reasons, such as the errors that occur when folding the paper, the strength applied to the hand at the moment of cutting, etc. Symmetry can be explained in mathematical language, but hands with scissors and brushes can never create symmetry. I am not trying to express mathematical beauty; I am trying to express the misalignment, gaps, and uncertainty of order that a person who has a mathematical order system in mind draws directly using the body. The forms of colored paper were formed on the basis of symmetry, but while they are cut out and painted on the canvas, they move in directions that break order and the possibility of change arises in the cracks. This is a concept that's pretty close to human life. The body born with symmetry all over has no exact symmetry in one place, and the shape changes continuously throughout the course of life.

I put the collected colors and shapes on the screen, and then played with them after that.I first placed the pieces of colored paper with repeating symmetry on the screen. Looking at these forms, I picked colors from 「Color Collection」 and put them together to create joyful responses. I painted the colors with big clear brush strokes or on a very smooth surface. I build up the dots and lines that are so dense that they cover the screen like a surface, while also building up the surfaces that flow like lines catch and lead the eyes. There are surfaces that bleed together and invade each other due to painting them before drying, and some of the layers have been made clearly visible due to drying and then painting. Accumulating the words of paintings collected as nouns and painting them as verbs, I accumulate such language and times. It is not a painting with the aim of being completed when attaining a set goal or outcome, but a painting that is painted only by attempting to paint it. I hope these paintings are pleasing to your eyes. Joyful, beautiful, and pleasant are words that describe the emotions I feel when looking at a painting, but they are not words that actually describe the painting. This is because they are ambiguous. Perhaps the actions of love have more specific meaning than saying the words “I love you”.But at the same time, saying the words “I love you” is also an action of love. Like the literary language spoken in Ted Chiang's novel 「Stories of Your Life」. “But language wasn’t only for communication: it was also a form of action. According to speech act theory, statements like “You’re under arrest,” “I christen this vessel,” or “I promise”were all performative: a speaker could perform the action only by uttering the words. For such acts, knowing what would be said didn’t change anything... With performative language, saying equaled doing.”(Ted Chiang, 『Stories of Your Life), 2016, p.216) I hope that these paintings, like the performative language, are the practice of what was previously vaguely described to be 'visual pleasure'.In the stationary plane, the past (body painted in motion), the present (a sense of stimulation at the moment of looking at the painting) and the future (the possibility of visual expansion of the painting) coexist. The painting is not a representation or explanation of 'pleasure', but a practice and language that can be achieved only through painting. Collecting things that are 'picturesque' and things that I 'want to paint' and directing them towards bringing pleasure to people is an aesthetic moment for me and it resembles the way that I love life. - 2020, Heaeun Hong

Flowers Everywhere