Somewhere Beyond Painting as a Process
과정으로서의 회화, 그 너머에

I’ve been told that it was not you, nor them, and it was nothing, it was nothing at all... As if it were a flower, a tear, or perhaps a story, there was a stranger whose face contained it all

The stranger is gone, passed by, waving his hands through the bright sunlight...

They say it's nothing, nothing, nothing at all, but the smell of grass was spread all over, and there was a peach blossom, somebody placed a peach blossom

Through the bright sunlight, there goes the face that showed it all, as if it were a flower, a tear, or perhaps a story...

“Seopungbu” by Kim Chun-soo

1.

In Kim Chun-soo's poem “Seopungbu” (西風賦), a scenery is depicted that is difficult to capture at once by written words on a single screen. The poem reflects on “seopung” (西風), which refers to the west wind and is called hanui-baram in Korean. This wind blows at the end of summer, which is dry and cool. A significant amount of time must pass between the hanui-baram and blooming of peach blossoms, which are also referred to in the poem. Owing to the conflicting temporal settings, Kim Chun-soo creates ambiguity within the poem as to whether he felt the hanui-baram blowing as he wrote the poem, or whether it was constructed from recollected memories.

Let’s start with the title of the poem. The third Hanja character, “bu" (賦) refers to a genre of Chinese literature that is similar to poetry or prose. The expression can be beautiful and lyrical, yet it utilizes more depictive language to describe scenery or objects, rather than the use of metaphors, as if they were seen through the writer’s own eyes. Because Kim Chun-soo utilizes “bu” in Seopungbu, the poem might be interpreted as descriptive writing that depicts a specific scene as observed at a certain point in time, but his intention is unclear. Because Kim Chun-soo repeats the word “nothing” when describing the subject scenery, it seems as if he has been observing nothingness. However, he used the phrase “as if it were”, suggesting that he intended to describe what was in front of him. There might be actual flowers, a tear, or a story or there might not be. The imagery created by the poem cannot be captured on a single screen. Instead, the reader composes sensuous scenes that weave the flickering of light, the smell of grass, and the sound of crying associated with stories and tears. By the time readers reach the middle of the poem, they can sense the dynamic movement introduced by Kim, as he refers to “passing by” and “shaking” within an unclear time and space. At this point, the lingering sensorial afterimage transmits to reverberation and echo, and the reader wanders between them.

Kim Chun-soo clashes words of implications, utilizes negation, metaphor, ellipsis, and inversion, and composes rhyme within the context of poetry. His technique encourages readers to create a collage of images that seem impossible to capture as a single scenery. Is it possible to draw a similar image through painting?

2.

It might be possible with Jun Jinpyo’s paintings. He emphasizes painting as a process. Through his body of works, “process” refers to a route of becoming, and a landscape of something unfolding. In other words, it refers to changes in time and space that exclude the final result and the meaning of completion. Painting as a medium is usually viewed as a fixed flat dimension. If one desires to present a fixed physical screen with an unfinished painting – or in Jun Jinpyo’s words, painting as a process – one must create certain movements within ongoing time and space.

As a child, Jun Jinpyo visited large-scale pavilions and stages where his father worked as a spatial designer. There, he found signs prohibiting access, sculptures, and construction materials. He encountered a landscape full of scaffolding while he wandered through the barriers in his father’s workspace. The structures on the site were temporary and variable. How can one capture the construction site’s scenery when everything is in a state of work-in-progress? The "Dear Process" series, which Jinpyo embarked on in 2009, was inspired by such sites. This series reminds viewers of a blueprint for a city or building left unfinished by an architect. In these early works, he used a multi-view perspective to arrange diverse formative elements. The lines cross one another to clarify the composition and components of the painting. Meanwhile, regular and irregular colored surfaces (if it is possible to label them “surfaces”) invade and traverse the various components within.

In his later works, Jun Jinpyo developed a form where the perspective has vanished. There are sculptures such as steel towers on a construction site and the perspective is difficult to ascertain, such as in the series “Quality Time”, which was produced after 2013. At this point, formative components such as pink pylons exist jaggedly on parallel lines without any perspective or acknowledgment of the viewer’s line of sight. The formative components juxtaposed in different sizes invite viewers to imagine the movement of those components as they increase and decrease without direction. It appears as if it were an object printed using software that utilizes mathematical functions in a virtual space. Around the pylon, painted and shaded, there are surfaces painted in various colors. It is as if each surface was created using the paint bucket tool in Photoshop and given a gradation effect in PowerPoint, which is far more alien than the representation of perspective or the three-dimensions observed in the physical world.

In “Seopungbu”, Kim Chun-soo juxtaposes words that contradict tenses and utilizes descriptions of movement for readers to “imagine the created time of a landscape that is permanent or permanently simultaneous.” Jun Jinpyo obscures the viewer's viewpoint, twists the perspective-based spatiality, and actualizes movement with the juxtaposition of rhythmic formative components. Such techniques end up executing a similar effect. A reality or an extension of reality becomes a disorientated experience as space-time is distorted.

Let's discuss what is possibly the most important theme for Jun Jinpyo: the repetition and juxtaposition of certain formative components, and the aspect of asking questions. Poetry occupies a reader’s imagination through an image constructed with words, while painting provides an image directly through the composition of lines and surfaces on the canvas. Jun Jinpyo's paintings, however, blur boundaries and raise the question of what makes an image. It is safe to assume that his experience creating and editing images in the digital space has influenced his paintings. A flat surface created in a virtual space using functions and commands in computer programs becomes a mere output value that easily can be deformed and distorted at any time. The flat surfaces have the potential to transform back into a line, a stereoscopic, an image with a pattern, and another space with one layer at any time. In this context, the “Untitled” series from 2013 may be interpreted as an experiment that examines colors arrayed with gradations (or colored surfaces), the arrangement of color chips that look like gradations in the distance (or colored surfaces of each color chip), and the arrangement of circular shapes and wavy formative components (or a surface or layer where a single component itself is distinct from the background).

By 2019, Jinpyo applies the elements from previous experiments on one frame in the “Untitled {∞×∞}” series. In 2023, he sliced thick dried paint, pasted them onto the canvas, and named the piece “Tide(#f8f8ed-93b4e1)”. It shows multiple surfaces or layers with similar colors and patterns waving in the same direction. This presentation confuses viewers in terms of setting a scene where the event occurs because there are multiple surfaces that can be seen as one surface, a layer, a space, or something else. Through this exercise of perception to understand the boundaries and collisions of surfaces, the viewers are dragged into a play that commands them to be actively involved in connecting and detaching the surfaces and sides.

The flat surface of Jun Jinpyo's paintings seem to expand infinitely, appear silky smooth, bounce back and forth, and pulsate consistently. Looking closely, the combination of surfaces collide by mixing two-dimensional elements and three-dimensional elements, and in the end, it is only a single-screen canvas painting. Through his technique – rough brush strokes, detached paint marks, flowing paint marks, smudges of paint between divided surfaces or lines, and sprayed coloring effects – Jun’s paintings make viewers aware of the physical painting in front of their eyes, existing in the same plane of view. His painting becomes a medium that makes viewers play with the possibility of flat surfaces that can unfold in various dimensions. Each of his paintings further become a canvas that embraces its physical limitations.

3.

Jun Jinpyo's paintings can be compared with Lee Seung-jo's (1941-1990) work exploring planarity. In the history of Korean contemporary art, Lee Seung-jo is known for employing a style most similar to Western geometric abstract painting. His "Hack" series expands and varies the shape of pipes repeatedly and infinitely. He recollects the moment he grasped the afterimage during a train trip, and this experience led him to conceive his pipe paintings. He continued the series by varying the shape of pipes, based on that simple formative component.

Jun Jinpyo and Lee Seung-jo's paintings overlap as they both pursue a pure world of flatness and do not represent the world of reality. Lee Seung-jo imagined “a space for a cosmic gaze”, while Jun Jinpyo constructs a virtual space without perspective or three-dimensional reality by forming flat surfaces within a painting. Jun’s use of lines and surfaces to create patterns with simplified and formative components is also akin to Lee’s variations of pure color surfaces with basic elements that pay respect to the flatness of paintings. Both artists actualize movements and dynamics through the juxtaposition and repetition of patterns. In other words, they both utilize the pattern of simplified formative components to construct a new flatness.

However, Jun Jinpyo's paintings are distinguishable from Lee Seung-jo’s work in that Jun came of age in a generation surrounded by digital media and urbanization, while Lee Seung-jo grew up in Korea’s early days of industrialization and urbanization. Mondrian believed in the existence of universal principles, and he turned the trees in front of him into abstract forms. Lee Seung-jo, whether he was conscious of his choice or not, achieved a similar geometric abstraction using a pipe, symbolizing the era of industrialization, and it was based on a lingering image in his mind from a fast train. If an abstraction originates from the temporal setting of an observation and the form captured by the observer, it begs the question of what the current generation working with abstraction sees in the time they live in.

Jun Jinpyo grew up observing construction sites and the multi-perspective landscapes of games and movies. This generation routinely scrolls through screens and moves their eyes and hands together as they click hyperlinks to open browser windows. Moving beyond simple copy-and-paste, this generation is highly skilled at using design software to synthesize and distort images through layers. With senses that have been nurtured in the digital world, this generation does not assign physicality to what it perceives at the moment of perception. Jun Jinpyo previously worked as an art director for music videos, and through that experience, he discovered that digital media is constantly in motion and interacting with one another. From his perspective, digital media references not only what appears through the video production process, but also wanders, replicates, collides, interferes, refers, transforms, and spreads among itself. Because he has been exposed to rapid and vast changes in media, Jun understands that what he witnesses at any given moment may never be complete or permanently fixed.

To Jun Jinpyo, there is no fixed meaning or form anywhere in language, object, or elsewhere in the world. In the rapidly changing digital media environment, constant movement and interaction between mediums are easily overlooked. If digital media continues to transform through restless interactions, as Jun explains, images captured through digital media are also in the process of creating new meanings through transformation. As a result, it is impossible to actualize the state of things as they are. Paintings represent things that appear to be fixed at a certain point in time, or things set within a temporal boundary, and it derives from the vision of previous generations. “Restless movements toward firm actuality”, Jun noted in his journal, “wander and replicate”, “collapse and interfere”, and “references and transform” each other. It seems that his goal is to create paintings that hold an immanent yet dynamic power to bridge the new reality and the old vision inherited from previous generations or old media.

4.

If asked what a painting represents, Jun Jinpyo might recite the title of this exhibition: nothing, nothing, nothing at all. A painting represents a process that may be seen as complete when viewers appreciate the bridging of movement beyond perception and the dynamics of today's reality.