Subtlety, the Crevice into which Perception and Recognition Slip

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Hwang In (Art Critic)

  Gallery Yeh presents a special exhibition for the painters Park Hyun Joo, Yoon Jong Ju, and sculptor Lee Hwan Kwon, titled Subtlety. 

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  There are two realms, the realm of perception and the realm of recognition, for us to judge and feel an object. These two realms are simultaneously dependent and independent, that is to say, perception and recognition are usually identical in everyday life. At times, a phenomenon occurs in which perception and recognition depart from one another. A state where an object or a circumstance that perception captures slips away in the realm of recognition and subsequently creates a crevice between them and causes mistrust for recognition, we call this ‘subtlety’. Subtlety leads us to a new, unfamiliar aesthetic experience.

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  Park Hyun Joo is an artist immersed in light. She has been working on a painting with gold leaf for a long time. Unlike the artworks that shine in the bright and white exhibition space represented by the White Cube, the works placed in the space devoid of light – for instance, works that must be looked at in a dark room in an old building with minimal lighting – had to reflect the light in its maximum capacity. Fusuma painting (襖絵/ふすまえ), a painting drawn on the paper partition between the rooms in traditional Japanese houses, is a prime example. Gold or silver leaf was employed as the main material.

   Indeed, Park’s gold leaf works do not constrain its functionality to the mere reflection of light. The light reflected on the gold leaf has a monochrome, single wavelength. In its reflection, all the wavelengths of the light are reduced to one single, powerful wavelength. The images, too, take a reductive, geometric form that her artistic world altogether comes to emphasize the reductionist process. The completion of reductionism through the use of gold leaf, perhaps, was her aesthetics. 

   Recently, Park has been more proactively using colors. The paint employed in the palette has materiality in and of itself. The traditional ground pigment that Park uses has a much stronger materiality than the common, manufactured oil painting color. The fragments of the ground pigment reflect the refracted light in different angles and wavelengths. These lights intersect and interfere with each other and create an aggregate with various and flashy colors. Then these colors concurrently create a polychrome set and a monochrome set comprising multiple polychromic sets that eventually look alike. 

   The accumulation of the polychromic layers makes the canvas increasingly brighter. Park deliberately employs dark colors in the background of her canvas. If in her gold leaf works, darkness was placed at the surface of the outermost layer of gold leaf and within the exhibition space, the recent works hide darkness at the innermost layer, in the background of the canvas. Park’s subtlety lies precisely in this point – in the bright light that contains darkness and in the dark space that embraces the bright light.

 

  The focalization in Yoon Jong Ju’s works is the color band at the margin between the color fields. The color fields go through an extremely delicate process to ensure homogeneity. The rigidity and rigor of the process and its delicate outcome let the color field to flatly extend beyond infinity. An infinite extension for the color field can only be permitted on a canvas, existing only in the world of geometry. On the canvas lying flat on the floor, layers of acrylic paints are stacked, during which the paint flows off at the margin of the canvas. Wiping these margins will allow the color field to have a brighter, more iridescent band of colors.

   With the emergence of this bright color band, the two-dimensional color field that once aimed at stretching out to infinity is contained as a surface with depth. This is the moment where the plane becomes a surface, which should be understood as one of the layers that compose a bigger mass. Any real thing has a mass regardless of its size. The color band in the margin serves the purpose of transitioning the concept of the plane to the reality of the surface. This leads Yoon’s two-dimensional works to be recognized as a surface and eventually as thin objets with colors.

   It is the gravitational force that distinguishes the plane and the surface. Independent of the gravity, the subject becomes two-dimensional; dependent, it becomes a surface. If the plane pertains to the blankness or universal space, the surface can be said to pertain to the loadedness or the place itself. The bright color band at the margin of Yoon’s works should be labeled a ‘subtle’ point that slips from plane to surface, from blankness to loadedness, and from space to place.

 

  We find strong elements of painting in Yi Hwan Kwon’s sculptures. In classical painting, there is a single line that connects the viewer, the artwork, and a vanishing point placed on the infinite distance that extends beyond the artwork, the so-called ‘single perspective’. Unlike the painting, sculpture allows multiple perspectives to examine the work.

   Yi Hwan Kwon’s sculptures are extremely compressed. His works can be said to have been placed in the middle of the transition from three-dimension to two-dimension. When the viewer standing in front of Yi’s sculptures shifts their perspective from left to right, the actual change in the angle perceived in the work is much more acute than the change that the body’s senses expect. 

   This acuteness puts a tight constraint on the range of the multiple perspectives commonly exhibited in general sculptural works. The more limitations we find, the more resemblance the sculpture has to the painting. Some sculptures (in these cases, there are works that are not really compressed) even bring shadow into the sculptural realm, an object commonly employed in paintings.

   The sense that the body habitually anticipates is closer to being a perception. Mary Anne Staniszewski’s quote “Believing is seeing” is no different from a claim that recognition governs perception. However, upon Yi Hwan Kwon’s compressed works, such a statement loses all its power. Knowing (recognition) can no longer dominate seeing (perception), and a crevice occurs between these two. It is from this crevice that ‘subtlety’ rises. The crevice is so profound that his sculptures transcend ‘subtlety’ and become staggering and even magical. 

   Most sculptures pursue mass or spatiality. Yi Hwan Kwon’s sculptures, however, pursue neither but ‘incidence’. They imbue angles to acutely changing perceptions amidst the linearly extending temporality and call upon us magical incidences. His sculptures disarm our habitual perception and lead us to the world of unfamiliar recognition. It is an awkward yet scintillating world of perception.