미학관 美學館 MIHAKGWAN Philosopher's Stone

Into the blue

2021.9.3.-10.5.


Artist|Heekyoung Jeon 

Text|Seulbi Lee


Into the Blue


Jeon Heekyoung’s landscapes somewhat evoke anxiety. Jeon transfers the landscapes, locations, or places from her transmundane realm onto two-dimensional surfaces, but she rids them of all perspectival depth. Just as paintings identified as “abstract paintings” are usually so, Jeon’s paintings cannot be categorized as representational because they do not contain any readable content nor correspond to any real-world object. In other words, this never-before-seen world is the product of Jeon’s inner realm. However, these “landscapes” resulting from her inner psychological motives somewhat surprisingly point to objects in nature such as Imaginal Valley (2015), Rain and Drop (2015), and Moon (2020). Yet, it was not always the case that Jeon’s works presented nature to the fore.

 For instance, Practice Being Human (2013), a series from 2013 that consisted of one hundred and eight drawings, hinted at the 108 defilements of Buddhism. There are many ways of calculating why the number of defilements is exactly 108, but here I am introducing one of the most doctrinal ways; first, there are 98 defilements, of which 88 result from the knowledge obtained by wisdom and cerebral reasoning, 10 from emotion and urges, and additionally, there are 10 underlying defilements that arise from a person’s ignorance, all of which add up to 108. The former 88, also known as defilements from reasoning, are easily overcome once one learns how to perceive the world in the true way. Whereas the latter 10, defilements from concepts, are not as quickly extinguished or overcome and require one to constantly cultivate the mind like keeping a mirror always clean and polished.

 We can’t know precisely what causes the doubts, suspicions, conflicts, and defilements within Jeon; we know that she has been trying to cut this cause away from her. Yet, as we could deduce from the series’ title, what Jeon was trying to achieve was perhaps close to a vow to practice “becoming human” or “worthy of being human.”

 Or, it could be an autobiographical question where she asks herself what it exactly means to be worthy of being human. Or an introspective determination she declares to herself as a human being. And on top of this is added a social narrative. Society demands certain conditions of “human-worthy” to its individuals. Jeon despaired and lamented the fact that she did not match or satisfy those criteria but nonchalantly unfolded the process of her acceptance with the attitude of a spiritual practitioner and made 108 drawings. Therefore, Practice Being Human can be seen as the result of a spiritual practice aimed to moderate her mind shaken from defilements or a series of 108 self-portraits containing her determination to live a “human-worthy life.”

 Jeon’s spiritual-practitioner-like drawings are continued in To Be a Man (2013). Traces of Buddhist doctrine are easily spotted in this series as well. Namely, the forms appearing in the drawings feature Buddhist mudras. The series consists of drawings made on red paper, and the individual works depict mudras growing out in the shape of blooming flowers in various manners. This series is reminiscent of the unidentified organisms infrequently cameoed in Jeon’s oeuvre, starting from her earliest works. The mysterious organism had stopped appearing for quite some time and seemed to have entirely disappeared. Yet now, they have emerged unawares, crawling over her works again, and their behavior resembles human desire, the source of all defilements. In other words, despite Jeon’s efforts to cut away defilements, they have returned and are shackling her once again. It is remarkably ironic that the defilements returned bearing the shape of Buddha’s mudras — the hand gestures provided to us by the Enlightened One — but nonetheless, the fact remains that desire has reappeared here and is reconfirming its place just as it always has.

 On the contrary, the drawings are somewhat evocative of hands put together in prayer, indicating that they were made for specific wishes and invocations. And in this sense, the series To Be a Man is directly linked to the Practice Being Human series. Desire is something we want to be freed from, but simultaneously, we make invocations that our desires are fulfilled (the same is true of defilements). To explain, life ultimately stems from having wishes, but wishes are born from circumstances in which we do not have what we want.

 The society’s demands, the reality of life, and the ideals held as an artist — throughout her career, Jeon has constantly discussed the rift between ideal and reality, which could be the cause of her desires. Reading from this context, even the “ideal” that forms one end of the rift cannot be assumed as representing a utopia or world of hope. Rather than being a world where everything is perfect and every wish fulfilled, the ideal in Jeon’s context is simply an itinerary or destination, and thus, the rift in her art is caused by a discrepancy that can never be narrowed. In other words, the discrepancy between ideal and reality starts the gap (or rift), and in turn, the discrepancy arises from desire and defilements. In Practice Being Human, Jeon, for the first time, attempted to find the cause of the rift and discrepancy within herself, and the series also signaled a point of transition in her oeuvre.

 Jeon’s paintings present scenes taken from inside the rift — specifically, the rift between reality and ideal — and within it roams the sense of alienation, unable to settle and forever floating around. This insatiable gap of alienation is the “void,” the space where desire resides. By nature, desire does not stay at a precise coordinate and always floats around. And every desire has an unquenchable thirst as its engine room, meaning that “a reality of not owning something” will always result in a desire. This is why Jeon’s landscapes contain hints of anxiety. In works such as Imaginal Valley (2015) or Utopic Life 2 (2015), we could see her continuing her discussion on the sense of alienation. However, there was a slight change. Rather than trying to identify what causes the alienation between ideal and reality or pursuing other such dilemmas, Jeon seems to have shifted her focus towards presenting the rift as space itself. Accordingly, Jeon increased her focus on nature and began presenting the results of her observation as a landscape of sorts.

 Jeon’s paintings are abstract in that they do not correspond to any real-world object, but there is plenty of backing for us to read her paintings as landscapes. First of all, her marks create a sense of spatiality. Overall, the gestures of the brush have grown more defined and vivid over the years. From around 2017, her use of the brush ascent to new levels of audacity and variety. The strong gestures contained in Jeon’s brushstrokes are, of course, some of the many ingredients that make up her unique style, but we must also note that they retain and immortalize the trajectory of the brush’s movement, a feature that creates a peculiar three-dimensional space upon her canvases. For example, a single, enormous brushstroke glides across the canvas in Study for the Shape of Wind (2019). The brushstroke is such that the starting point and the endpoint are clearly engraved in it, and the surface area of the brushmark folding into itself creates the illusion of objects overlapping in three-dimensional space.

 Yet, it is unclear what the stroke corresponds to, if any. All we have is the clue Jeon left in the work’s title, from which we could speculate that the brushstroke is “something natural” or “someplace in nature.” This is the other reason why her paintings denote landscape. In other words, Jeon bestows arbitrary titles that point to certain natural elements that do not have a fixed form — such as wind, air, and water — or subtly suggest a place or a moment, like in Dawn Blanketed by Sea Fog (2020) or The World Where Droplets Gather (2020). However, when put against the dictionary definition of landscape, “natural scenery, as of mountains, prairies, rivers, oceans, etc.,” the landscapes Jeon poured onto the blank spaces seemingly match the definition, yet cunningly awry.

 Historically, the sense of vision was the pivot and root of Western ideologies, and as a result, the landscape was merely considered one of many “objects” that the self, or observer, perceived. And because the landscape was provided through a lens worn by the self, this liaison between self and object turned landscape into a set of structured reasoning in Western history, especially in Europe. Seeing is, in fact, the condensation of reasoning and logic. Reason interferes with the senses and segregates and limits their freedom. Most of us can easily recall the scientific perspectival systems applied to landscape images; perhaps, such things could obstruct us from accessing the unknown world. What does it mean to “see” a landscape? Could it be that distinguishing the self — the entity that does the seeing — from the object is what disrupts us from accessing the world? In this sense, Jeon’s landscapes do not distinguish between self and object. The paintings are too manneristic to be considered “scenes of nature,” but simultaneously, they are too suggestive of real-world places to be judged purely as the expression of emotions. Therefore, it is only natural that she became interested in Eastern subjects, such as the tradition of shan shui and the Peach Blossom Spring, reflected in her works Scenery of In-Betweens (2014) and Daydream (2014).

 The rift presented in Jeon’s paintings is the manifestation of Jeon’s unique and individual inner world, a realm where the self and the object are not distinguished apart. And the paintings’ lack of reference to real-world objects and refusal to depict the physical world in any form of representationalism convert the uncertainty one feels from confronting the rift between reality and ideal into an unshakable placidity, deepmost shades of blue that reminds us of an abyss. However, Jeon has always remained tight-lipped to any questions asked about the color blue, a consistent presence in her oeuvre from the earliest works. The shades of blue she uses are drawn from unspecified imageries of natural features such as the river, ocean, and wind, so the range of her blue is not specified or limited, nor narrowed into one color. As a result, every color around the periphery of blue approach the viewer in somewhat natural yet indeterminate shapes, which is why Jeon’s landscapes are outside of the representationalistic world dictated by reason.

 Kierkegaard wrote, “He whose eye happens to look down into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy,”1)  comparing anxiety to the dizziness one might feel from looking down into an abyss. Jeon decompressed her defilements onto her canvases until she reached the state of complete placidity, by which she became immune to every uncertainty and anxiety evoked by the sense of alienation. A world of self-sufficient placidity and comfort: this could be her invocation, the ideal she aims to arrive at. Thus, the activity of making paintings still remains to Jeon as a spiritual practice; a journey into an abyss’ blue shades or a journey into the unknown lands of the blue.

 

In a recent interview,2) Jeon introduced herself as “a person like the color blue . . . someone who dreams of living as cool and free as water, but in reality, more like someone living submerged at the bottom of the deep sea.” She was later asked to choose a word that interests her the most in her life, and her response was “balance.” I found this answer just as intriguing as her self-introduction because it seemed to hint at the soundless battle she was constantly fighting to preserve her existence from the two extremes — or the two ends of the rift — she presents through her paintings.


Text by Seulbi Lee  

1) Kierkegaard, Sören. The Concept of Anxiety, edited by Perkins, Robert L., Mercer University Press, 1985, p. 106. 

2)  https://www.tentothen.com/20th