Your Choreographic Notation
너의 무보(舞譜)

If all goes according to plan, from the very entrance of the gallery, several instances of what might be called a betrayal of painting will catch one’s eye, and this suspicion becomes certain upon gradually entering the exhibition space. A painting is settled onto a carefully and precisely crafted pedestal. This placement resembles the body positioning of an actor who has stepped onto a kind of makeshift stage. You move according to a dance notation—or perhaps according to the minute movements just before and after failing to drop the anchor on that score. You. Without you, there are no “scattering moments.”

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I thought I knew the artist Jinpyo Jun, but in fact I did not. I first met him with the natural assumption of seeing paintings hung vertically on the wall, but my premise crumbled. As a matter of fact, he rarely hangs paintings on walls the usual way, as most would expect. He uses canvases assembled sandwich-style with front and back wooden panels, and these canvases are attached at a certain distance from the wall according to a method of his own. When I asked why, he refrained from answering directly, deflecting toward his thoughts on “the role of painting.” In other words, he found “a way to let the painting show itself” and “a way for the painting to be taken in at a glance.” Here, being visible “at a glance” seems to merely include the moment of visual observation but goes further, closer to the result of his self-measurement of the painting’s purity. The notation he has been transitioning through, away from those conventional qualities often deemed the most painting-like, is in this exhibition converted into a choreographic score just for you. Accordingly, the aforementioned provisional stage is an interpretation of the exhibition space in which the role of Jun’s painting must maneuver.

From his early works up to this very interpretation, he had already laid the foundation for this transition. The barriers in his early works gradually shifted from representational subjects to metaphors. Barriers serve as both trompe-l’oeil veils determining technical mastery—from the ancient Greek rivalry between Zeuxis and Parrhasius through Rembrandt’s The Holy Family—and as devices that stimulate our desire to peer behind, by the very act of their being drawn. “Things that I try to conceal with barriers” soon converged into fixed ideas—particularly fixed ideas about painting—for him, crystallizing as new challenges. Jun’s proposed transformation of viewing methods serves as an ingenious device for connecting the fragmented spatiotemporal segments that construction site screens, as painting’s fabric supports, have arbitrarily severed and positioned. So when asked, “Is this thing you are painting actually a painting?” he answers “Yes,” although here painting in general becomes either too expansive and vulnerable or too worn and obsolete. Instead, retreating to “scattered events” or “fragments” and now defending from that zone, there emerges a way of viewing his works instead of paintings in general.

Jun has reached a concrete conviction, but the way the painting is positioned – which will come across to the viewer as a kind of gentle entreaty – certainly influences the viewer’s movement. It was from there, by my own arbitrary detour, that I recalled Michael Fried’s Art and Objecthood. Fried’s text causes thorough misreading from the first reading, and thus from misreading rather clearly imprints the turning point where art becomes objectified. To mention briefly, Fried labeled the emergence of Minimalism of his time as literalist art, explaining that “the sensibility of literalist art is theatrical because it is concerned with the actual circumstances in which the beholder encounters literalist work.” The term “theatrical,” applied almost as a pejorative, if flipped around becomes tantamount to a declaration that the viewer’s involvement had now become defiant and undeniable. It is self-evident that no painting can ever be completely separated from its surrounding environment.

The painting that Jun has reorganized in his terrain now invites you. He expresses his position that when you, who will view the works by tracing large circles in the exhibition space several times, encounter paintings along your route, and when you brush past them, he hopes you will “have some difficulty.” Perhaps, in other words, this is an extension of what it means for something to weigh on your eyes, to catch your gaze and not let go. The artist’s intention, or hope is there. Even so, he cannot fully control the way you view and experience the exhibition. Around the works “painted while imagining how people will see them in some flow of light,” various vocabulary derived from spatial prepositions seems to be layered one upon another. These fragmented words, as if striking in from the side, do not necessarily coalesce into meaning and are therefore rather sharp. Jun describes his overall practice as “this is close to the phonetic value as material for new words that speak of the world, new sentence and paragraph composition,” but in this exhibition this phonetic value is revealed by borrowing the form of text. Words precisely stenciled in various parts around the periphery of the paintings may have been hoped to remain silent almost ‘unguarded,’ or like ‘babbling,’ but the power of their evocation is strong. Some confirmed words include “ACROSS,” “BEFORE,” “NOWHERE,” and so on. So then, where, in which direction, and how should one move? The opening and closing depends entirely on your senses and way of seeing. Since nothing is made explicit, discretion falls to me. Even the script for the exhibition-related performance fades out with misaligned words, folded sentences, and gaps in opaque speech. Erika Fischer-Lichte, author of The Transformative Power of Performance, summarizes this moment as the “re-enchantment of the world.”

Even aside from an aesthetic experience, it is you (and I) who undergo a special situation in which “a crossing of a boundary toward something, and a transformation within this or that” occurs, and it is the artist who orchestrates this. For the most part, our dialogue consisted of lightweight deixis – words that, like prepositions, can scarcely stand independently – but from that I did gain a few proper nouns. The nouns obtained while questioning his preferences and tastes in style of writing were taken as clues for approaching him and his work. However, when I fumbled through a few books, a certain detachment arose unlike the usual. From Georges Perec there suddenly sprang forth a “you.” “You are an idler, a sleepwalker, a numbskull.” The “you” in this text was actually inspired by Perec as well. Meanwhile, in explaining the origin of the title of his series Ostinato, Jun made reference to Deleuze’s “ritornello.” If Deleuze devised ritornello as a characteristic of expression that repeats while still accompanying difference, the artist implements repetition in a more modest way. Ostinato – a series of repeated variations in acrylic composed of roughly three tonal steps – appeared in a blue tonal range in previous works, and in this exhibition in a gray range. The process of painting Ostinato is precise to the point of solemnity. Yet he enjoys this error-free precision without clinging to the outcome, a disposition evident in this series as well. It might even appear as infinitely identical repetition; clues in the subtle changes are entrusted to the senses of the invited viewer.

If the newer works positioned in the central space of the gallery and Ostinato series have a relatively distinct role in this exhibition, the paintings on the walls at the periphery of the viewing route came across to me as meta-paintings. According to Jun’s explanation, these works are cases where “certain fragments that occur during the process of painting in order to compose a scene” were realized as paintings. In the works where these pieces are arrayed and reflected on the canvas, the internal structuring within painting seems to present itself as a larger task than the visuo-perceptual experience that accompanies bodily movement. The procedures of painting over several times, then scraping away and even tearing off, lead us to glimpse a sense of pictorial space within the painting and the three-dimensionality of external work structure to the degree that they appear to be directories for the work.

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Let me add one more example regarding the detachment I experienced. In Deleuze’s chapter on ritornello, the figure who captivated me was Paul Klee. Klee speaks of the gray point in reference to painting. “This gray point is nothing other than dimensionless, indeterminable chaos, the force of chaos, nothing other than a mass of tangled wandering lines.” Not as a gray point among the compositional elements, but as a gray point that elicits the very potency of painting – it sounds like a metaphor for the spectrum of painting’s possibility at its minimum and maximum extremes. Jun expands from Klee’s gray point metaphor into points, lines, and planes, yet he differentiates them into moments of events, such that the end of that terrain is not merely the canvas’s boundary. Is this what a painting that can walk would be like? Is the ambition for painting that tries to step over or overcome through pedestals just a reckless attempt? However, contemporary painting that has crossed the branch of objecthood sets tasks while never converging painting into an ideal. Jun’s choreographic notation summons you in order not to be “too broad and defenseless or too worn and useless.” Your choreographic notation, essentially, becomes ours.