Master of Fine Arts Thesis
Hidden in Plain Sight
Jinee Siennie Lee
Submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirement for the degree of Master of Fine Arts, School of Art and Design
Alfred-Düsseldorf Painting
New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University Alfred, New York
2022
Jinee Siennie Lee, MFA
Kevin Wixted, Thesis Advisor
Abstract
This thesis presents the formal, conceptual, material, and aesthetic aspects of my studio practice which are rendered in three ways: painting, sound, and installation.
Society can be seen as an independent being and ecological system, analogous to nature. Each element is an indispensable component of society, and they ultimately aggregate to constitute the whole of the world. To focus on describing my perception of society as a social organism, I collect pictures, sounds, and articles on current issues as a fundamental process of my work. I dismantle the images and superimpose those
fragments, and assimilate them into an enigmatic landscape of a living organism. In addition, by using a self-made “Chladni’s Plates” to obtain abstract patterns from contemporary speech, I visualize the sounds by transcribing the vibrations of frequency onto the paper with water, salt and powdered pigments.
I create art using materials with transparency that look different depending on the position and angle of lighting and applying overlapping ways as a major formative language. Prior to the full-fledged discussion, I would like to point out the concept of overlaps from my perspective. Overlaps have played a role in diluting and mixing the boundaries between layers, and mediating the content and form of my work. In other words, they have been continuously applied to the creative process as a medium and principle that intersects time and space.
In this text, I will navigate my interpretation of society in all its diversity of meaning, and translate visual space to observe the connection between nature and society, and further provide clues to grasp society and the value of existence surrounding us.
Table of Contents
As a Bystander ... 4
Society, like Nature ... 5
“Grass” – A Poem by Soo-young Kim ... 7
Rendering by Painting ... 9
Overflowing Society ... 9
Relevant Artists ... 16
Everything Boils Down to Nature ... 18
Rendering by Sound ... 20
Resonance ... 20
Rendering by Installation ... 25
Eco-Logic ... 25
Epilogue ... 29
Bibliography ... 30
As a Bystander
I have led a relatively comfortable life in South Korea. I attended a well-
renowned institution, receiving both a bachelor’s and master’s degree in oriental painting, and was recognized for holding exhibitions and publishing books. However, when I traveled around the world as a travel writer and came to study art in the United States and Germany, I was humbled by the realization that I was only a small speck in the whole and large fabric of society. I inadvertently became a stranger and observer in a western
environment, which was unwittingly discriminating against me; it did not see me in any way other than my outer appearance, which was only natural and with no fault, being unaware of myself or my achievements.
This predicament put me in a unique position as a bystander, where I apprehended the movements of life surrounding me. In an increasingly diasporic world, I observed the issues of a dynamic society: the shocking, the concerning, and the warming. But what made an impression was when I turned to see the streets outside the café window, away from the tides of information from the channels of media, life was normal and ongoing.
The political and social turbulence that I heard starkly contrasted with the unexceptional and quotidian that I saw. However, the inconsistency was reconciled as I realized the disturbances were permeating and subsiding into the ubiquitous entropy of our society.
This perception reminded me of the social organism theory.
Society, like Nature
Social organism theory is a concept that considers society as an organism and attempts to understand society by the analogy of living things or biological evolution.
According to this theory, society is like the human body, and it moves in harmony like circulation in nature, if the people perform their roles well. At the same time, however, society cannot exist or be complete without individuals. This is because all things are indispensable components of society - even if there is a hierarchy of importance among them -, and they ultimately constitute the world. In conclusion, society and individuals are closely connected to each other and cannot be explained separately.
In the first half of the 19th century, Auguste Comte1, the founder of the theory of social organism, was aware of the chaos after the French Revolution as a crisis in the bourgeois system, and conceived order and stability based on positivist2 intelligence.
Influenced by the development of natural science at the time, he obtained a model of positivist sociology from the notion of biological organisms and tried to interpret social phenomena by analogy. Since then, Hebert Spencer3 elaborated this theory, while Paul von Lilienfeld4 and Albert Schäffle5 developed social and organic theories alongside it.
I started to visualize society as a social organism. In particular, I was drawn to the matters of those thrown in front of the predicament of life and inevitably forced to
1 Isidore Marie Auguste François Xavier Comte (1798-1857) was a French philosopher and writer.
2 Positivism: A philosophical system which holds that every rationally justifiable assertion can be scientifically verified or is capable of logical or mathematical proof, and which therefore rejects metaphysics and theism. (Oxford Reference)
3 Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) was an English philosopher, biologist, anthropologist, and sociologist.
4 Paul Frommhold Ignatius von Lilienfeld-Toal (1829–1903) was a Baltic German statesman and social scientist of imperial Russia.
5 Albert Eberhard Friedrich Schäffle (1831–1903) was a German sociologist, political economist, and newspaper editor.
reconcile irregardless of their will. Furthermore, one of the major roles of artists that I have always believed in is to bring people’s attention to social concern by utilizing a visual or conceptual strategy of their aesthetic system. For me with this sense of mission, the manifesto declared by Agnes Denes had a great influence. Questioning, reasoning, analyzing, dissecting, and re-examining. Understanding that everything has further meaning, that order has been created out of chaos, but order, when it reaches a certain totality must be shattered by new disorder and by new inquiries and developments.
Finding new concepts, recognizing new patterns. Understanding the finitude of human existence and still striving to create beauty and provocative reasoning. Recognizing and interpreting the relationship of creative elements to each other: people to people, people to god, people to nature, nature to nature, thought to thought, art to art.6
6 Agnes Denes and Klaus Ottmann, The Human Argument: The Writings of Agnes Denes (Putnam, Conn.:
Spring Publications, 2008), 15-16.
“Grass” – A Poem by Soo-young Kim7
The grass lies down
Waving in the east wind that drives the rain The grass lay down
And finally cried.
After crying the more because the day was gray It lay down again.
The grass lies down
Lies down faster than the wind Cries faster than the wind and Rises before the wind does.
The day is gray and the grass lies down.
To the ankles
To the soles of the feet it lies down.
Though it lies down later than the wind It rises before the wind
Though it cries later than the wind It laughs before the wind does.
The day is gray and the grassroots lie down.
7 Kim Soo-young (1921–1968) was a Korean poet and translator whose poetry explored love and freedom as poetic and political ideals.
When I was a teenager, I read this poem and memorized it for a while. This poem, which likened people's lives to nature, gave me a great resonance, and I naturally began to seek to understand the connection between society and nature.
Except for the repetitive structure of "grass" and "wind", no message is
transmitted in context to us. It is just that the four verbs, "Lie down", "Cry", "Rise", and
"Laugh", are repeated, forming the mainstream of the poem. However, the more I absorbed historical events and background knowledge, the closer the poem came to me.
The grass is a metaphor for the people and their resistance to oppression and exploitation.
In contrast, rain, wind, and east wind represent the military dictatorship and foreign powers in the 1960s in Korea. Although the grass is collapsed crying by rain, wind, and east wind, it rises and laughs first, before the wind. The poet saw the tenacious vitality and the resistance of the people in the grass. I am convinced that this poem has had an influence on me, who have consciously and unconsciously pursued to find the vitality of people in nature and to discover the commonalities between nature and society.
Rendering by Painting Overflowing Society
“Foliage of Perseverance” and the “Kaleidoscope” series are produced in the following way: I sketch images of various scenes on transparent silk(絹纖維) using a projector; leave traces of brushstrokes; add numerous greenish colors until all parts are filled with individual mark makings.
Data on the most significant protests in the world
There is a similarity between the form of demonstrations in which people gather and speak, and the appearance of species in a natural ecosystem gathering and surviving for their own purposes. In the book, “The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate”, I was able to find a basis for my idea. But the most astonishing thing about trees is how social they are. The trees in a forest care for each other,
sometimes even going so far as to nourish the stump of a felled tree for centuries after it was cut down by feeding it sugars and other nutrients, and so keeping it alive. … The reason trees share food and communicate is that they need each other. It takes a forest to
create a microclimate suitable for tree growth and sustenance. So it’s not surprising that isolated trees have far shorter lives than those living connected together in forests.8
In “Foliage of Perseverance”, there are eleven different protest scenes, such as protests against the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Farm bill protests in India, stop Asian hate protests, LGBT, and environmental protests. The list of protests in the last three years was gathered from the “Global Protest Tracker9” by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and protests were portrayed differently based on the size and duration of each demonstration. Then I reconfigured all the scenes of protest into one painting.
Foliage of Perseverance, 2022, Color on Silk, 70.8" x 102.3"
8 Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate, (Vancouver:
Greystone Books, 2016), 7.
9 “Global Protest Tracker,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, last updated on April 1, 2022, https://carnegieendowment.org/publications/interactive/protest-tracker.
Furthermore, the concept of multiple slices of Swiss cheese, stacked side by side, is used as a metaphor for the human system. A single hole in cheese represents a special condition, and an event occurs when all conditions are met at the same time. On the other hand, the risk of a threat becoming a reality is mitigated by differing layers and types of defenses which are "layered" behind each other. I focus on the association of various conditions and influences occurring in society in this painting. I interpreted the
occurrence of a protest by fulfilling the several conditions including time, space, people, and purpose, and incorporated the aspect of social phenomena into a singular screen by drawing the Swiss cheese model.
I attempted to produce diverse impressions in various factors such as thickness and color by using different brushstrokes. As the repetitive brushstrokes accumulate, heterogeneity and harmony become more prominent at the same time. Each brushstroke represents individuals who are part of society or countless happenings that cannot be specified. These individuals and events do not have to be limited to something specific because it goes without saying that they are part of society and play a small but important role in society. I interpret the individual drawn with single brushstrokes as the “subject”, and the overall screen that is completed by them as the “world”. As stated by Merleau- Ponty, the world is inseparable from the subject, but from a subject which is nothing but a project of the world, and the subject is inseparable from the world, but from a world which the subject itself projects.10 Additionally, the brushstrokes on silk give the feeling of floating and flowing in the space within the frame rather than settling on or integrating
10 Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Colin Smith, Phenomenology of Perception, (Nevada: Franklin Classics, 2018), 499-500.
into the surface. These features provide new visual stimuli by replacing the prescribed meaning of the original image with various undefinable expressions.
Similar to this concept, I made the “Kaleidoscope” series. I perceived that the characteristics of a kaleidoscope have something in common with the social organism.
Like a society that continues to change, the screen in the kaleidoscope constantly changes due to light and color. For the series, I gleaned photos, such as images of the Taliban, child marriage, and pandemic from diverse media and journalism in the world. Since journalism is the production and distribution of reports on current events based on facts and supported with proof or evidence, it provides more reliable stories and images than other mass media. In addition, as journalism records today’s issues, I use it as a function of a substitute for the real world. Especially, by collecting photos with sufficient
messages to record the present era, I intend to pursue a direct approach to modern
people's lives. I concentrated on current societal occurrences not only as of the priority of the objective world but also with my subjective judgments. Then I composed and
overlapped the images to create an encrypted surface.
Collage for “Kaleidoscope: 2021-P”
“Kaleidoscope: 2021-P” depicts five different scenes of the COVID-19 pandemic with medical staff wearing protective clothing. I gathered pictures from five different newspapers, which are published in Korea, the U.S, Germany, China, and Brazil, and arranged them into one canvas. Although each moment occurred in a physically distant space, I judged it to be an organic example of sharing the same era and looking at a common goal. The five scenes are fragmented, the pieces are superimposed on one screen, and eventually assimilated into enigmatic natural landscapes.
Transparent materials that look different depending on the position and angle of lighting were used in this series to visualize a multi-layered society. In addition, I created the series in a square form to reveal that all social situations are social components of the same value, and have equal importance like the surfaces or the lengths of the four sides of the square.
Kaleidoscope: 2021-P, 2021, Color on Silk, 51.2" x 51.2"
While working on “Foliage of Perseverance” and the "Kaleidoscope" series, I used a limited palette of bright watercolor paints. This was to visualize the image using colors containing transparency. Transparency makes us look at the world anew through light from a perspective that is related to and united with the surroundings. Furthermore, the radiant transparent colors are expressions of the essence, and not an expression of emotion in my paintings. In other words, I use bright colored pigments so that the color looks like "light," the essence of the color, rather than "color itself." These colors expand into space, not just inside the canvas, depending on the lighting, a characteristic inherent in light as well. Moreover, the colors shine even more next to the bright colored line drawings, which encompass the work to give a lively feeling of light. What was revealed as a line is the structure of the object existing in the picture I selected, and I tried to give
information on the object in the painting that could end with an abstract screen. Line drawings, which have little change of light and shade, can be seen as a static and rational expression that implies the details of social affairs.
I work on encoding the complicated society in aesthetic ways and I left the audience with decoding of the multistage that exists in it. The finished work may be accepted as an abstract painting depicting nature or color composition, or it may arouse curiosity with a small hint enough to hypothesize that some images may be hidden inside.
Since a person’s perception differs and inevitably sees selectively depending on one’s experiences, knowledge, and psychological factors, my work could be interpreted from different perspectives depending on the viewer's interests. It doesn't have to be
recognized at that very moment what kind of images are used in my painting. Besides, it is okay to be accepted by someone as just a visually pleasing painting. This is because the subject and current events originally intended to be expressed already exist in my
painting, even if they are hidden from the audience’s view.
Relevant Artists
In terms of archiving contemporary issues and using overlaps, I discovered the commonalities between my works and the works of Sigma Polke and Julie Mehretu.
Sigma Polke(1941-2010) tried to record changing generations by objectively using images prevalent in the digital age. I perceived a connection between his work and my work in that we both archive the modern era based on the imageries of the period and realize a complex society. He portrayed the irrational aspects of society by superimposing or hiding images of mass media. Moreover, he especially used transparent screens to make the screen itself visible from the front and back of his painting. Such double-screen techniques function to provide a multi-perspective to viewers.
Julie Mehretu(1970-) has opened many possibilities for interpretation by
combining her private history and global history in her painting. She has shown dynamics and the hybridity of time and space through layered images, and the relationship between the numerous indicators, such as civilized infrastructures and geometric symbols, shown in her work signifies the interaction between individuals, communities, and the
environment. Just as the overlapping imageries in Mehretu's painting create a narrative and form a new space, I produce an encrypted surface by superimposing multiple images with differences in clarity, and combining them to form green or natural shapes on silk.
Although there is a difference in how deeply the societal data is applied to the work, the two artists' works actively represented contemporary accounts in very
interesting and mysterious ways. Their works convey a clear message to viewers, despite their enigmatic appearance.
Insik Quac, Work 84-S, 1984, Oriental ink, Paper on Canvas, 49.6” x 68.5”
The use of brushstrokes, colors, and oriental identity in my painting can be
explained in connection with Insik Quac(1919-1988), a Korean contemporary artist. Insik Quac's work, which seems to emit sensuous light, consists of the effect of overlapping the light-colored ellipses simplified on white paper countless times. He painted oval marks, sometimes in monochrome, and sometimes in transparent and clear colors such as yellow, red, blue, and purple. Due to the difference in concentration of the overlapping elliptical points, the diversified colors form a sense of space on the screen of the plane, and the empty space left between the dots becomes a transparent space, making it seem as if light leaks out from the paintings. The color in his work embodied in this process is defined as the state of "color that has already been changed to light" beyond the materiality of the color. In his later years, Insik Quac viewed oval dots as a tool to discover the rhythm or breathing of his body rather than as a means of expressing visual images, and as a joy to realize that he is a part of nature.
Everything Boils Down to Nature
I focus on contemporary issues of conflict, famines, pollution, and epidemics;
each continuously repeats with variance, and leaves traces of tangible artifacts and intangible memories, attesting to the cycle of a dynamic society. I believe such perpetual ripples help us further understand society.
Everything boils down to nature, 2021, Ink and Color on Handmade Paper, 12" x 12" (x 99)
In “Everything boils down to nature”, ninety-nine photographs were transferred to handmade paper that I made, and all specific scenes were assimilated into the grass. The overall environment that constitutes a human society, that is, history, tradition, norms, politics, and economy, reflects the appearance of individuals constituting society.
According to this, each happening occurring around the world can be explained not by the event itself, but by the relationship between individuals and the environment that
encompasses our lives. This painting looks like a green abstract painting or a landscape of grass at first glance. However, in fact, different histories exist within ninety-nine squares, including a Palestinian boy throwing a stone at Israeli tanks, September 11 attacks, and the Korean War. I used the photographs of Pulitzer Prize winners and well- known iconic images from around the world as a source of my work. After the audience stares at the work for a moment, they can recognize and ruminate on the symbolic scene that everyone has encountered at least once.
“Everything boils down to nature” is a work to give way to those who have been forgotten, remembered, condemned, accomplished, vocalized, or silenced. By ruminating on history, I tried to reveal its meaning and visualize the cross-section of society
poetically. Although images do not directly denote society, I believe that this painting containing the past has infinite possibilities about our society, space, and environment.
We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection. Something closed must retain our memories, while leaving them their original value as images. Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these
memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.11
The main material of the work is handmade paper from recycled paper and bark. I believed that reproduced paper was most appropriate for representing reinterpreted history. Moreover, the imperfect condition of the paper, as seen by holes, tears, and incomplete finishes, created by inexperience in paper manufacturing signifies a distorted record of history.
11 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, (New York: Penguin Books, 2014), 37.
Rendering by Sound Resonance
I have tried to create abstract patterns that could be applied to my work and linked to my subject more directly. Looking for other shapes hidden in society, I made the
"Chladni’s Plates12" to obtain a pattern using sound resonance. “Dogmatic Resonance
“and "Songs of Grass" are sound-based works of a project to record social events, using specific speech and the poem.
Chladni’s Plates
12 The Chladni’s Plates is an invention created by German scientist Ernst Chladni(1756-1827) that is a technique to study the motions of vibrating plates. Chladni, one of the pioneers of experimental acoustics, found that it produced characteristic patterns that could be related to the physical dimensions of the plate, starting with a metal plate whose surface had been lightly sprinkled with sand. "Chladni’s Plates", as they came to be called, provided an early way to visualize the effects of vibrations on mechanical surfaces. His research on different kinds of vibrations served as the basis for the scientific understanding of sound that later emerged in the 19th century. (Smithsonian's National Museum of American History Reference)
the syllable-based hertz extraction process
As the first step in my work, I selected and extracted sources, and worked on sound adjustment. Then, I classified the speech by syllable, and made a pattern by extracting the most commonly occurring frequency for each syllable. In order to obtain patterns more effectively, I limited the sound used in the work to sound less than 550 hertz. I recorded a video of a change in patterns according to sound, or transcribed patterns to paper using water, salt, and powdered pigments.
I started looking for recent speeches in languages other than Korean or English.
This is because I aimed to exclude my judgment on the speech, thoroughly accept it as a sound source, and express it visually. The speech I used for the first sound-based work was Vladimir Putin's. "специальная военная операция". His words in Russian sounded to me like an old unknown tune of music or noise or mumble. I separated his speech into syllables and extracted the most frequent frequencies to make patterns. The pattern created by his speech, which means "special military operation" in English, was cheerful and beautiful contrary to the content. I displayed the work of the results in sentence form.
специальная военная операция
s/pet/si/al'/naya vo/y/en/naya o/pe/rat/siya
스/피/치/알/네 보/아/이/안/네 아/페/라/체
The speech divided by syllable (Russian/English/Korean)
Dogmatic Resonance, 2022, Pigment and Salt on Korean Paper, 9.8" x 19.6" (x 14)
The work, “Dogmatic Resonance”, which looks like Egyptian language, Native American hieroglyphics, or pictograms that were recorded in ancient caves, reflects the times. Just as I record the images of events occurring in the contemporary era in painting, I intend to archive the sounds of the present through sound-based work. The purpose of this work is to attract people’s attention and induce new conversations through abstract patterns that look like a language.
Songs of Grass, 2022, Pigment and Salt on Korean Paper, speaker, 9" x 19.6" (x 60)
"Songs of Grass" is a visualization of Kim Soo-young's poem, "Grass," which was included earlier in this paper. The frequencies were extracted in the same way as in the previous work, but the thinner lines were intentionally generated using two colors to express the invisible atmosphere of the poem. In addition, only the top part of each piece of paper was fixed to create an air-like flow, so that irregular shadows were revealed below, and sometimes flapped by people's movements.
The speaker installed in front of the work and the poetry of the poet flowing out gives the audience a hint about this work. Every hour, a short poem recitation plays
through the speaker. The recitation of fewer than two minutes in a low voice is in Korean, so it cannot convey the exact meaning to many people, but its tone, rhythm, and
intonation are enough to convey the atmosphere of the poem to the audience.
Furthermore, the powdery pigment that bounces off the top of the speaker by sound waves suggests more directly the principle and work process in which the sound is visually embodied.
I found similarities between my sound-based work and Rolf Julius’ work in terms of materiality. Rolf Julius(1939-2011) is a German artist who has been known since the 80s for his sculptures and sound installations. His catalog, created by the Xippas Gallery in Paris, contains this description. When one thinks of his work, what comes to mind are not so much objects, stable and defined. Rather, these are “moods” or “atmospheres” or
“situations”. “Ecosystems”, in which things and places are enveloped in sounds.13 His practice was based on a double approach, at the boundaries of visual art and musical creation, so that his works have a literary character, and lead the audience to enter a state of mindful awareness.
Rolf Julius, Singing, 2000/2015,
7 speakers, black pigment, wires, CD-player, amplifier, variable dimensions
13 Rolf Julius, “Rolf Julius,” Xippas Paris, 2022, 22.
Rendering by Installation Eco-Logic
Eco-Logic, 2022, Ink and Color on Chiffon and Wall, Installation
I describe narratives with personal and collective history, experience, and symbols on transparent material, like chiffon fabrics, and convert them into our current place.
Historical shapes structured in diverse layers intersect and interconnect each other in my work, represent one side of our community, ruminate or break one's context, and create space and time at different levels. It also illustrates the complexity of our multilayered world.
"Eco-Logic" consists of a total of seven similar and different structures of
improvisation. This work, including six pieces of chiffon drawing and one wall painting, is completed by people who are looking at my transparent work entering the installation, and creating continuously changing sights. In this work, the constructive components present in drawings and the physical structures are opposed and connected at the same time. The physical structures mean the non-living objects that exist in society, and the drawings that flow organically in them symbolize the invisible beings prevalent in society: nature, air, energy, and so on. In addition, the fabrics flowing flexibly from the ceiling fluctuates repeatedly, creating wrinkles or swaying back and forth, providing a situation in which they are alive in themselves. At the very back of the work is a wall painting, which is a trace of chiffon drawings being made and another newly covered figure on it. I found the connection between this process and the social construction stage and interpreted the results as the foundation of society.
Impromptu brushstrokes and various vivid colors overlap, adding confusion to the whole of the work, which represents the intricacy of a turbulent society. The gestural movements, geometric signs, and flows of lines that appear in common on the surfaces symbolize biomorphic language. This organic language connects with one another to make new sentences and creates individual and integrated narratives while capturing the overall flow of the paragraph.
Parallelism, 2021, Ink and Color on Chiffon and Wall, 110" x 157.5"
Through interactive work, “Parallelism”, I visualized a society that moves like an organism in nature and changes every moment. Abstract drawings of chiffon and a wall mean system that exist at the moment I've been drawing so far. By increasing the scale, I added my gestural movement which is a part of the organism.
There are two ways to see the work. First, the audience in the work can see a wall painting and drawings on chiffon on both sides. The work is interacted with them, as they pass by to cause the material to flow with the air. By entering the work, the audience will be able to engage in fresh perceptual activities, even if they are unintentional. This is because we seize, in the act of perception, something which outruns perception itself.14 On the other hand, there is a way to look at the parallelism of wall painting and fabric drawings outside the work. The people who are outside of the work can see a constantly shifting screen through a person moving to see a painting in it.
14 Henri Bergson, Nancy Margaret Paul, and W Scott Palmer, Matter and Memory, (New York: Zone Books, 2005), 106.
Movement of Joy, 2019, Ink and Color on Chiffon, 51.2" x 181.1"
To emphasize the quality of transparency, I have employed various installation methods, including installing larger paintings in the forest. "Movement of Joy" is a work that conducted experimental installation to apply the atmosphere or situation of the surrounding environment.
The painting is an impromptu drawing using ink and color on chiffon fabric.
Several colors were forced to invade each other's territory, and pigments were dropped by gravity, leaving an accidental mark. After that, I drew ink lines drawing on the colorful screen, decomposed them, and added diverse dimensions. The color surface overlapping with the transparency of the chiffon causes an optical illusion as if looking at a three- dimensional work at the same time as a painting. The painting in the forest is directly influenced by the environment and atmosphere, including wind, sound, light, and silhouette of trees. This interaction visualizes that all individual organisms gather to create, change, and eventually form an organic society. I recorded the movement of the work in a video, and gave another role to influencing other works.
Epilogue
All works, audiences, and objects interact in my work. Depending on what the audience is attracted to and where their curiosity builds up in the work, the work can be interpreted in a completely different direction. Even though they don't see individual images, or if they see totally different things, it's certain that something they see is one organism that exists in our reality. And the act of looking at works from such diverse perceptions is similar to the process of understanding and accepting society from our own perspectives. My interest is not that everyone's attention is focused on exactly the same place, but that my work is interpreted in various ways according to their point of view and presents new possibilities about our society.
I hope that my work is a metaphysical language that could understand today's society, a landscape built in a complex visual language, and at the same time, a space to discover myself as an organism. Using visual language as my voice to address
sociocultural issues, I aim to understand the relationship between society and nature, and individuals. I hope that my works engage with the audience to stimulate dialogue and provide an opportunity to immerse themselves in the painting’s scene of society.
Additionally, I would like to trigger a change in the audience by presenting them with a visual that is unfamiliar with the explicit reality they are aware of; this will lead them to revisit the events of society and the value of existence that may have been lost to time.
Bibliography
Book
• Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. New York: Penguin Books, 2014.
• Bergson, Henri, Nancy Margaret Paul, and W Scott Palmer. Matter and Memory.
New York: Zone Books, 2005.
• Denes, Agnes, and Klaus Ottmann. The Human Argument: The Writings of Agnes Denes. Putnam, Conn.: Spring Publications, 2008.
• Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, and Colin Smith. Phenomenology of Perception.
Nevada: Franklin Classics, 2018.
• Wohlleben, Peter. The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They
Communicate{U2014} Discoveries from a Secret World. Vancouver: Greystone Books, 2016.
Exhibition Catalogue
• Julius, Rolf. “Rolf Julius.” Xippas Paris Exhibition catalogue, 2022.
Website
• Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Global Protest Tracker.” Last updated on April 1, 2022,
https://carnegieendowment.org/publications/interactive/protest-tracker.
