Building Undulations of Emotion. Joyfully and Painfully
 
There are feelings that are impossible to express although their existence is unquestioned. As when I was presented with a bouquet for the first time from someone, I felt a certain feeling piercing through me. It is momentary. It is a certain substance, the expression, the voice, the scent, and the delicacy that penetrated through my body. And there is the feeling when you try to ignore the gaze of the person who tries to tell you they are sorry. There is the emotion that I felt when I was looking at his back as he turned away and at his mingling image of seeking reconciliation. It was a sense of sympathy and a sense of relief to the extent of feeling like a sense of disgust. Perhaps it may be an entirely different feeling. These are feelings and emotions, and they are beyond a definite description. These are things whose originality is nearly impossible to recall or represent. Feelings may not be fully expressed nor completely represented. Nevertheless these feelings do not leave oneself but remain to be cherished.
The recent works of Seo Ji-hyoung embrace such feelings as they exist in actuality despite their expressional ambiguity. She calls them 'emotional memories'. To the artist, such emotional memories are not so much attached to her realm of consciousness as something that are preserved in the body. As they are not remembered by the consciousness, they refuse to be labelled, titled, or organized. They are more contiguous to a vibration, a tremble as the body emotionally reacts to a certain object, perhaps a certain color, texture, or form. Following this perspective, they are memories that are sealed in the body. These memories are seals that are carved in the body, and they cannot be labelled in an attempt for clarity, resulting in ambiguity and vagueness. While for those who pursue clarity and definition such obscurity inevitably creates nothing but inconvenience and needlessness, it is an unchangeable treasure for an artist that seeks a deeper emotional world where he/she can confront him/herself. The artist, rather than attempting to clarify something that is ambiguous and vague, enjoys and agonizes about the existence of such. This artist is Seo Ji-hyoung.

Then how does Seo Ji-hyoung embrace emotional memories? Her method of embracement is kneading the objects, colors, texture, and forms from incidents that gave her a certain physical vibration or an emotional undulation into solid and flat forms. For instance, she produces a candy shape to invigorate the feeling of sweetness of the candy whether it is a joyful or a painful feeling. It stirs up the sweet memory of her teacher exclaiming, "How did you know this was my favorite?" when she presented the candies, and the feeling of happiness, of satiation of the moment. Such emotion pleases her and hurts her at the same time in that it is has not parted from her and remains within her but has disappeared as a part of the past, something that no longer exists. Another instance is bringing back the childhood memory of the sudden fear or horror that surmounted her when she saw the red stomach of the red-bellied frog, or restoring the delicate emotional interchange with a family, a friend, or a lover through forms of shoes, a chair, a squid, or tools. She also stirs up the emotional memories of a scene that captured her sight during a trip. Joy accompanied by pain, and pain along with joy.
The material to recall such feelings and emotions is no other than rubber clay. When warmed up, rubber clay can become as soft as anything to be shaped into virtually any form. This is all the more true when the rubber clay is kneaded with hands and warms up to the body's temperature. On a plane surface, a layer of sky-blue clay is attached with another thicker layer of violet clay. In between, a layer of pink will be put in (as if inlaying a celadon, and as if carving an emotion on the body). Every moment, the steps of infusing the warmth of the body, pressing, and pounding the clay will be repeated over time. During that process, the initial shape will inevitably be transformed and mixed with the other. It is a metaphor of how the piercing feeling of receiving a flower bouquet from someone for the first time settles within oneself to be converged with entirely different feelings with the passage of time. Then follows the astonishment! The rubber clay becomes nothing other than a rubber eraser after it is stiffened!
It is the concurrent feeling of joy and pain, pain and joy that I experience in Seo Ji-hyoung's works. My own layers of emotional memories resonate with her works. These feelings are ambiguous, and to confront ambiguity as it is instead of converting it into clarity is a deeply perplexing and painful task. Nevertheless, the essence and nature in encountering art and in relating to it is found in no other than such. It is my personal wish that the artist stands firm against the temptation for clarity, but still stands above submerging into ambiguity itself, and ceaselessly roll out an emotional undulation.
 
By Hong Ji-seok / Art Critic


 

Artist's Note 
 
In my work, I recreate images from memories with rubber eraser (initially a form of clay which hardens into a rubber eraser when heated). The rubber eraser, which is now the material of my work, is actually the identical material I used to play with twenty years ago. This childhood experience has shaped my special emotion toward the material, which became the starting point for my present work. The meaning of the eraser goes beyond simply being the material of my work, in that the eraser itself is a symbol of existence and oblivion and that it is used in recalling the domain of memories that are already deleted or still kept, or memories that could be erased shortly even though they exist now. Furthermore the physical property of the rubber clay before being heated has everything to do with recalling one's childhood memories. By using clay just like a child playing with it in a non-professional method, I wanted to share a message that art is not necessarily abstruse and exists in our everyday life. It is also my wish to stir up a sense of appreciation and nostalgia toward 'memories' in the viewers, in that memories are the whole substance that make up ourselves.
The images that are created through this process involve the realm of memory that could be brought up to the surface of consciousness without a laborious effort. It covers the entire domain of time from the precise moment the mental process of memorizing initiates to the very present-a moment which turned into the past just now. Especially, I began reshaping the combinations of memories that relate to the present. The accumulations of memories of visual or physical experiences are the substance that compose the current me, and therefore the method I use is to recombine the objects reminiscent of the fragments of memories stored within myself. As a result, I discovered that I naturally began by recreating those certain 'incidents' that caused emotional upheavals during childhood or my personal 'turning points' in life, which suggests the continuity between the present and selective memories of the past. In this process, while the starting point was mainly centered around myself, the sphere of my work has expanded to include things surrounding and related to me, memories that are shared by the contemporary mass, and also stories of the environment.
It is my hope that my work remains honest and sincere and reflects the affection for myself and those surrounding me. At the same time, I wish to use simple and plain material easily seen around us to create a small passage between people and art, which is actually not so distant from us. Memory is the substance that composes myself; it is the beginning of all human relationship. It is the existence of memories that enables recollections, love, and even pain to exist. Hopefully, my works become a record, a journal, or a heart-warming essay that contain such things.