You, Who Make Encounters in Fleeting Moments
- A letter to JIN Minwook ahead of summer 2023
PAIK Philgyun
Every value blossoms from death at dawn that makes someone stop taking steps. Good and bad presuppose life and death, and life consists of a finite amount of time to question its value. In these many questions, knowing (知) is not knowledge; tao (道) is not the way. Since living in time tells no reason to live, all that exists dies without knowing itself. In a universe that has been ever-expanding since the separation of the beginning of time, life is a mere fleeting moment of scattered fragments.
A story is a time in which pieces of the universe intersect or face each other, and a person who tells the story is a piece that connects different fragments. The fragments telling stories follow the direction in which all things flow, either traversing or retrospectively, collecting new stories. In a world where everyone gathers and disperses, JIN Minwook tells stories through her paintings. For her, painting is a way of appreciating and owning stories. Taking certain inspiration from a collection of poems in the Classic of Poetry, an ancient text compiled by Confucius, JIN translates images of flora and fauna into paintings. Having studied traditional painting materials, media, art history, and theory within the discipline of art history, she pores over the oldest book of poetry in Chinese history, searching for images to translate into paintings. This seems to resemble the activities of artists of previous generations, but it forms an autobiographical context for the artist. In the genealogy of the paintings of flowers and birds—paintings of flowers, birds and animals, and plants and insects, many of the subjects in JIN’s paintings have symbolism. Although the modern world has lost many of the cultural symbols of traditional societies, the image of nature on a sunny spring day still serves as a symbol of beauty and prosperity in its own right. Images of peaceful relationships between flora and fauna evoke the idea of conforming to nature’s innate order.
As JIN Minwook’s rhymes intersect with images of flora and fauna, a sense of loneliness suddenly emerges. There, something pokes its head out of the clutter. When the artist borrows the figure of oriole from a poem known as “the hills of the east (東山),” she expresses the theme and image of the original poem according to the idea of synchronicity between poems and paintings. At the same time, she projects herself as an author who presents them. In the poem, the oriole shows an image of someone longing for a fiancé who has gone off to war or her maiden home after being away for a long time. In JIN’s painting, the oriole is an observer who reflects on herself and her surroundings as she goes through the funerals of the people around her, and it is a girl who longs for her childhood and the landscape of the old house where she lived with her grandmother. Inherent in the little bird is the duality of the “seen” object and the “showing” subject. What appears as a singular symbol is combined and unified.[1]
In the painting of a yellow oriole, painted after the artist’s bereavement with someone close to her, three rabbit traps appear as another object of this “showing subject.” With fragile branches held together with paper tape, they look more like something for ritual or play than hunting tools, just like the pile of stones next to them. Incomplete preparation inexorably delays the time for an innocent face to be captured. It takes a long time before someone looking at the painting realizes that they have already been caught in the greater trap of painting. In the previous exhibition, the artist mounted painting boards in a circle on the wall, in the corner of the wall, or in empty space. And in the current exhibition, the upper right corner of the square-shaped painting board is flanked by a number of L-shaped painting boards. These compositions are unusual but reminiscent of an image of folding screens, revealing the borderline where the artist sits between the real and the illusory, much like the setting in her painting. Her paintings generate a mise en abyme where mirrors face each other and reflect infinitely, and it is an old spell that opens a door to someone’s abyss. JIN Minwook opened the door, and there are echoes of the abyss’ breath throughout the space where the fresh verdure sways.
Embracing the breath of May and the summer breeze, she compares her paintings to a “Lesser Hermit (小隱)” in the title of the exhibition.[2] She envisions painting as poetry for small things. In order to face the very “person” that no one else knows, to mourn “him” that no one remembers, JIN Minwook finds and stays in a place that resembles a prayer room. The chirping of small birds isn’t the only sound allowed in JIN’s paintings, which feature spaces that open at dawn, pheasants and deer, butterflies and bees, flowers and trees, and a variety of other creatures.
The oriole is a summer bird. The awakening movement of spring leaves fluff on the branches in the center of the screen, spreading one of the wings behind the painting. Just as Bodhidharma leaves one shoe behind and heads west, the little bird takes flight. In such a way, JIN Minwook leaves time given to her and fragments moving in space, arriving at another fragment of time. It is a time for still objects, moving images, and connections. She stands in a small lair in the center of the abyss, her expression nonchalant. At last.
[1] See Giorgio Agamben’s Stanzas. Trans. Ronald L. Martinez. Minnesota UP, 1992
[2] (Bai Juyi, a poet from the Tang Dynasty in China, wrote about a life of quiet hermitage. If a talented person hid from the world and lived in mountains and forests, he was called a “lesser hermit (小隱); if he lived with dignity in a crowded place, he was called a “hermit in between (中隱)”; and if he held an official position lived a leisurely life, unencumbered by the troubles of the world, he was called a “hermit in town (大隱).” JIN Minwook’s attention to the small hiding place in Bai Juyi’s “Three Hermits (三隱)” is meant to suggest her general attitude of distancing herself from the world and practicing self-discipline through her work while also distancing herself from people in the process of immersing herself in her work.)