akive

Title | Light, the Border with Time
Period | 10 Oct. ~ 23 Oct, 2012
Venue | Leehwaik Gallery
Website | www.leehwaikgallery.com
Artist | Boyoung Jeong


Light, the Border with Time,
on Boyoung Jeong’s Recent Painting, Lighting Up

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Regarding to Boyoung Jeong’s 2011 exhibition, I gave a title of “Space, the Boundary of the Sublime” to the world of her paintings. However, at that time I made few comments about where the sublime beauty of her paintings was originated from. And I decided to pay more attention to her progressive developments, keeping an eye on her subsequent works. Since then, three years have passed away and her paintings have got more refined and sophisticated. Now, it is the time to make a remark concerning the origin of the sublime beauty that has not yet been dig out, because it is so deeply embedded in her works. I am very pleased to write this epilogue about her recent works.
In my response to her previous exhibition, the reason why I suggested that her paintings represent “the boundary of the sublime” was that she tried to put an emphasis upon a certain peculiar spectacle inherent in a space. From her works, we could ‘look at a spectacle’ (specere), which means that we can ‘watch something’ (spectare) difficult to find out in our routine everyday life. In her paintings, a spectacle implies a mysterious and unfathomable situation that we cannot easily notice in our ordinary life. Her works invite us to open our eyes to a sort of a splendid spectacle concealed in our everyday life. To put it simple, the way of a light filling up a space is presented in her works, when a ray of light is cast over a dark space from various oppositional angles such as the front and the back, the right and the left, or the top and the bottom. In this way, her paintings show that a space is made by the minutely changed waves of a flickering light depending on a lapse of time. The sublime beauty is obtained at the moment when her painting represents the serene and tranquil sea of a light with a sharp contrast of lightness and darkness or through the employment of the spectrum of light close to infinity in order to bring a light into a space. That is my point in my previous epilogue to her paintings.
In this epilogue, I will try to illuminate the changes of spacial spectacles shown in her recent works, making an additional explanation about their multifarious aspects. For your understanding, I am going to make a brief description to her painting. In her work, a light bulb is hung from the ceiling and a natural light is shone through the open door. A streak of light is tranquilly shone through the chinks of the window and a candle is brightly lighted up in a dark room. Also, a dark-blue light in a night sky is juxtaposed with a lamp lighted up in a room. All these presented scenes reflect her intention of making a natural source of light overlapped and contrasted with an artificial light at the same place. In fact, the most conspicuous and noticeable part is that a space in her painting gets more dynamic and vivid owing to the two juxtaposed light sources. A bright sunlight is shining outside of the door. And then it forms a beam of light, while pouring into a dark interior space through the open door or the window. As shown in Lighting Up or A Door Opens, the sunlight through the window, a distant view outside the window, a candle glowing by the window or in a pitch-black night is the main objet that we can see easily in her paintings. Also she represents two different shadows casted by two standing lamps in a dark room, as in Lie One Upon Another. On the other hand, in Blue Hour, as bringing a dark-blue light into a space, she makes a striking contrast with a dark-blue sky to the saturated scarlet color of a lamp light and lets us know that there is a wall blocking the inside and the outside space. In these ways, she draws into her works a minimal difference of lightness and darkness, in other words a differentiated intensity of a light gradually changed by an elapse of time. To her original intention, the disparate luminosity of a light is well-functioned in making a simultaneous contrast and a successive contrast between objects. And, through those aesthetic devices, she represents how an ‘event’ is invented by time and the very event is inscribed in a space.

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It is considerably important that, in her paintings, she does not simply make an optical or chromatological experiment with those devices. Rather than that, she endeavors to visualize the ‘resonance’ of our beings by representing lightness and darkness as a phenomenon made by a ray of light. It is not exaggerate to say that she represents an event itself which is deeply involved with light and time. As shown in Lighting Up, a light-up candle throws a light upon a dark space, making a distinction between lightness and darkness. This seems like the first event that everything can be discernible by a light. On the other hand, a glowing candle makes a blurry zone, or a borderline between lightness and darkness, which is also a space which cannot be said that it is entirely light or dark, for an amount of lightness emanated from a stick of a candle is very small. In her works, even the borderline that is divided in its very outline is represented. And it forms a mise-en-abyme of an event that our beings are born. Also, to put it differently in the psychoanalytic terms, the borderline of light is the gateway to approach an entirely different area of darkness. Simultaneously, it is an exit to the unconscious deeply embedded in our consciousness.
Technically speaking, a light from a candle, as in Lighting Up, is governed by the rule of time. From another perceptive, it could be a symbol to a glowing light of our souls. It is very intriguing that a candle light in the technical sense is dialectically reconciliated with its metaphorical sense in her painting. According to Bachelard, ‘'A candle light itself is composed of a white light and a red light. The white light is closely related with a blue light at the bottom of a candle, which means the cleaning-up of a corrupted power in a society. On the other hand, the red light is connected with the wick of candle, which means an entire impurity and dirtiness. A candle burns itself struggling with the conflict of those two lights. A candle seems like a battlefield that the rising movement of a white light collides with the anti-rising movement of a red light, that is a battlefield of a value to an anti-value’(G. Bachelard, La Flamme d’une chandelle, 113).
According to Bachelard, a light in the symbolic demension means the truth of the soul that an artist desires to reach out eventually. If so, in Jung’s painting, a flame of a candle is not a physical one of a candle vehemently rising up to the top. Jung tries to show the possibility that there can exist another flame or light beyond the world of physical phenomena. So she represents a reverie of a flame elevating a light in a material world to the light of our souls. Clearly contrasting a natural light to an artificial light, she represents the minimal difference of light in order to take a glimpse of “the resonance of the soul”(retentissenment d’âme), which is emphasized in the Bachelardian context. She presents a light as a metaphor beyond a light in the physical world. In other words, she takes a look at the feminine side of a light as an anima by depicting the masculine side of a light as an animus. This reminds me of the following part cited from Leonardo de Vinci; ‘Look at a stain on the wall. You can see a mountain, a ruin […] or a sacred natural scene there. Again, there you can see a battlefield where the human bodies are fighting bitterly […]. Like this, you could find out all kinds of language that you can imagine in an echoing sound of a bell, as watching a stain on the wall’(Leonardo. da Vinci, “Ut picture, ita visio”).

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In the 16thcentury, Leonardo took a notice of the sublime beauty in a stain on the wall. Howeve, he did not recognize that the sublime beauty is precipitated by the borderline of time which is closely interlocked with a space.
Jung explores the origin of the sublime beauty through directly dealing with a spectacle of a light which is co-existent with the threshold of a time. She creates the visionary moment made by a light as a raw material and treats it as an event that happens in ‘a ray of light,’ which is the borderline of time. She thinks that a space itself is originally concomitant with a time.
Accordingly, a space is minimally represented in her picture. She presents only an empty room with darkness, an interior space with an overwhelming stillness and darkness, or a distant view to be seen through the open window, with audaciously omitting many possible items which perhaps might have been placed in an interior space. Of course, we can see a space covered with an entire darkness in the Baroque paintings in the 17thcentury.OtherwisethantheBaroquepaintings,herworksusesanemptyspacewithdarknessintheverypeculiarway.Itfunctionsasaminimalconditionwhichmakesherworkpossible.Forher,aspaceisnotasecondarymeansusedtostandforanotherthingsymbolically.
In her works, a space is the space itself where an event of our being happens. Also, our beings, things like a stone or a tree, and the world are originated from the very space with an entire darkness and emptiness close to nothing. As soon as a ray of light is poured into a dark room, chaotic darkness in a room disappears. And then a new order of a differential system comes out by a light that makes everything discernible.
Apparently, a light in her works seems to be standstill in an interrupted time. For her, a space is revealed by its own outline or remains empty close to nothing. Accordingly, an empty space is deeply involved with an interrupted time. In her many works, temporality is prior to spatiality, which means that the change of a thing is entirely dependant upon temporality, not spatiality. For an example, a flicker of a candle light remains just standstill and unwavering in her painting, which cannot, in fact, be differentiated or discerned in the physical world with our naked eyes. To put it differently, she tries to represent the paradoxical moment implicit in Zeno’s fleeting arrow. In this regard, she represents a virtual world, in other words, an impossible world that cannot be represented. She examines such an unutterable things (Wittgenstein). Her works allegorically reveals the fleeting moment when the first difference is made by a light.
To capture such a moment, she gazes at the threshold of time, with concentrating on delicate changes that a light inscribes in a space. In her works, the borderline of time is not an absent space in the Lyotardian terms. On the contrary, it, in the Heideggerian sense, is the space where beings-in-the world belong to and the moment when a thing makes itself appear. The represented space in her paintings affirms a secret without a secret that our beings are entrapped into the unavoidable net of temporality.


- Kim, Bok-Young ( art Critic, master professor in Seoul Institute of Arts, linguistic theory of arts)