Critics
Aesthetic Design and Positivity in Life Contained in Walking
_Conscious image and consciousness as an image
Art critic Hong Kyoung-Han
1. The act of ‘walking’ provides artists with new perspectives and ideas and helps in creative activities. In fact, it is not uncommon for artists to create artworks inspired by walking. For example, Hiwa K, a well-known refugee artist from Iraqi Kurdistan, depicted his life in the diaspora in the form of a biography, drawing on his personal memories. The series of records encompassed the experience of migration in a multidisciplinary approach that included colonial history and modern political history.
Among his many works, “Pre-Image/Blind as the Mother Tongue” (2017) depicts his journey from his hometown to Italy as Gilgamesh . Specifically, it shows the process of escaping from chaotic Iraqi Kurdistan as a young man and his journey to Europe via Turkey and Athens, Greece, and then to Italy.
Walker Evans, an American photographer from the early 20th century, also observed life in the city, the architecture of the buildings, and the people and expressed their lives in photographs. The city streets and the people he encountered on his walks became catalysts that reminded him of the importance of the everyday in his work.
Richard Long from England is a case in which walking (the traces that walking leaves behind) is art. He has presented works, such as installations and photographs, on long hikes in mountainous terrain. His works, which focuses on exploring the interaction between nature and man and the flow of time, can be called ‘footprints of walking’.
For Okubo Eiji, a first-generation land artist, ‘walking’ is also the most important means of creating his own artistic language and has an aesthetic meaning in itself. He has expressed his admiration and reverence for nature through the act of ‘walking’, and this act is appreciated as a new form of performance art, and at the same time, is an ecological study connecting different cultures.
In particular, most of Okubo Eiji's installation works use things taken from nature and returned to nature after the exhibition. This intact naturalistic thinking and the artificial exclusion of capitalist or artificial things distinguishes him from other American-influenced land art artists.
2. ‘Walking’ is also very important in the works of artist Paek Yunzo, as it is the root of her work. However, it is different from the artists mentioned above. About the beginning of ‘walking’, the artist said, “The knots that were once in my body and mind disappeared when I walked", and “(when I walk) I receive small joys, good feelings, and positive energy, and with this power, the work of painting begins in earnest.” For the artist , ‘walking’ is a time to get rid of distracting thoughts or create a new work plan, and is the process of feeling alive.
In a society that constantly discourages people, walking can be an unexpected gift that adds vitality to life. The benefits of walking are obvious: finding peace and strengthening one's resilience, finding the courage to focus on the life ahead, and banishing the worries associated with human affairs. When the formative perspective is possible, walking goes beyond the mere movement of the legs and the alternate lifting of the feet.
From an aesthetic point of view, walking is an act that goes beyond the disclosure of one's own experience from the inside through the movement of thought. The artist says, “the sense of stability that comes from walking and removes the distracting thoughts", but her ‘action’ presupposes the artist’s will, which refers to conscious and deliberate action.
The will is the desire to achieve something, i.e., it is based on a clear intention and motivation. However, Paek Yunzo's paintings have almost no footnotes and are visually very simple. The purpose and motivation in her paintings are difficult to understand. Her figures, walking alone or in groups, are clearly going somewhere, but the destination is unknown. The painting does not explain why they are walking. She simply leaves it to the viewer’s imagination. That is precisely the point.
The figures in her paintings are not clear. They do not have much to do with the speculative history of the individual figures. As in the works of “Wind” 2020 and “Cognac” 2019, the figures are characterized by a simplistic forms, which is Paek Yunzo's unique artistic technique, and the details are somewhat empty. They are usually depicted in a neutral situation, but the simplicity of the composition creates a sense of immersion and allows viewers to get closer to the essence of the subject. Furthermore, these formative elements add to the modern feel of her work. They further stimulate the imagination and progression of the story.
It is the power of imagination that makes Paek Yunzo’s work so appealing. The interesting thing about her works is not the explicit meaning, but the process of thinking and inventing a story in the viewer’s own way. However, this does not mean that the figures in the painting are walking aimlessly. Through the various animals they hold, such as dogs and cats, and objects, such as bottles and balls, we can see that all her works are ‘conscious images’.
For example, the work titled “Heavy Work”, shows a scene of moving forward with a heavy backpack and big shoes (hiker) that conveys a sense of responsibility and weight in life. Many works such as “Walk”, “Happy Birthday”, “Milk Cartons,” and “Ugly Car” are also conscious images. These works, imbued with memories of places the artist has been or moments of existence and sense of space, share that they are projections of temporal and experiential narratives, such as time and speed.
3. Animals and dolls appear frequently in her work acting as a reproach to beings that have naturally fallen into oblivion over time and a desire for essential purity. They are depicted in the arms of a striding man, in the hand of a woman, and sometimes alone, as in the “Walking Cow”, painted in 2021.
Of course, there is also a message. It welcomes the new year sincerely, even if it is difficult. The forward movement is evident in series, such as “Heavy Work”, in which she depicts unusually large feet, and “Walking Cow”, with animals and dolls, adding brightness to the painting, letting the viewer feel the artist's deep affection for living with people.
There is something melancholy about her paintings, but they are painted with the heart and not with the head. As in “Pick Up”, “Midnight Walk”, and “Free Riders”, the term 'thief’ or 'free rider' for figures carrying animals and dolls is a metaphor for forgetting and the loss of existence. “Escape”, is imbued with the warmth and consideration of the artist who does not want to lose her precious objects and the ambivalent meaning of redemption.
However, the artist does not depict this seriously. Theft is inherently bad, but it develops into a humorous story as the animals become free riders. As she said, “the little play on things that go unnoticed and the interest in humor” gives the painting a light twist, and the cynical nature that appears at first glance evokes humor rather than discomfort.
A work showing a cat being embraced by a person running as if it were jumping, “Walk”, derived from the series 'Doodle' which looks like graffiti, but is not shown in this exhibition, and the series “Face”, which tactfully captures the movements of people, actually belong in the same category. The common denominator of these works is that they are full of paradox, duality, contradictions, and questions, coupled with a sense of rhythm and joy. All these things (which may have to do with symbols and signs) are conscious images or products of consciousness as images.
Consciousness as an image is a means of revealing the ‘flow of thought’. The figures in the work and their appearances are different, but the stories exist at the same time and coexist with others through concrete and cognitive forms and behaviors that exist in the current time. The flow is the core of Paek Yunzo's work. Within this flow, a narrative is created.
If we go a little deeper, her work is not detached from perception as a phenomenon. Certain phenomena are integrated into each scene, and perception is not a passive reception of sensory information. It is active and embodied participation in the environment and is indicative of the cultural background and personal experiences on which the natural objects and subjects in her paintings are based. Her paintings are not only visual entertainment to be enjoyed but also an understanding of how the artist perceives, recognizes, and interprets the world.
So Paek Yunzo's works may simply be objects, animals, or scenes encountered in everyday life, but it is not far-fetched to say that their reality is the result of perception as a phenomenon through conscious images. It is a state in which it does not matter in what situation the other person assumes it to be, and because it is not tied to the narrative, it is a state that allows us to fall further into the world of fantasy, so that we only occasionally miss it.
4. The artist's works combine realism and abstract elements. At first glance, they are actually everyday things that have nothing to do with us and are perhaps even boring, but when you look at them from an artistic perspective, they turn out to be amazing scenes, and thus have a structure that makes them no longer every day. Not only is the exchange between different beings in space and time imprinted in the structure, but also anecdotes and strange tensions between people and situations appear.
Paek Yunzo's work is characterized by the fact that it starts from a personal story and deals with situations that modern people have to think about at least once, and it presents the meaning of the existence of objects through phenomena and situations in a playful framework from the artist's point of view. That is enough. Another remarkable point is that she replaces the universal with the particular.
But there is something else we should pay attention to. It is drawing. The artist does not provide a model for her work. The image that suddenly comes to her mind is left as a drawing, and the surface is carefully aligned around this impulsive drawing. Instead of trying to force something, she concentrates on the structural aspect at the interface between the conscious and the unconscious. So, although it is a drawing, the artificial feeling cannot be excluded. Because it is overly organized, certain decorative effects remain. In this respect, her work could perhaps be a little more reactive or bold (this can be clearly seen in the "Doodle" series).
It is not without a calming aftertaste, and that is also an advantage, but in my opinion, Paek Yunzo's skill shines even more when she shows freedom, as in her drawings, and the vanishing point of imagination, which completely excludes fixed techniques. As she has the talent to depict the lives of people who live an unremarkable everyday life in her own style and achieve sensual communication, it becomes clear that the ordinary of our everyday life is no longer ordinary.
What is impressive is the fact that empathy and resonance function in her overall work through the format of flatness, even if it lies within the boundaries of the figurative. (As mentioned earlier) it is also important to mention that it stimulates the imagination, leaves room for interpretation, and is open for others to understand it according to their own views.
Since it is very valuable for an artist to present, create, and question a new view of the world, today's race to create her own unique language is the future that can be expected from Paek Yunzo. A work of art can always change.