Continuing again at Ground Zero

Hyosil Yang

2022

Kyeongbin Jeong’s 2022 solo exhibition Walkingwithoutlegs is not a representational or imagistic landscape painting show. They are traces/allusions of treeflowerseasonforest on tiny canvases that are impossibly small to be appreciated as landscape paintings.
The scenery visited with the body and seen with the eye is erased and replaced by short, repetitive brushstrokes using relatively low-saturation paints. And they are, according to the artist’s words, “dirty and messy paintings”. They seem like a beginner’s painting, not afraid of the painting’s authority; a painting that has been abandoned behind a building; a painting that does not want to be appreciated; and a painting that is insufficient for a solo exhibition.
Just as the artist who knows how to paint’well’ and has practiced her identity as a painter for a long time shows her critical self-consciousness towards the current paintings as mentioned above, or as that sentence proclaims a break from her former painting techniques, this solo exhibition announces a certain ‘beginning, a ‘transition’ from the presupposed affiliation and recognition to non-identification and questioning. The act of painting intentionally bad or the act of painting that abandons her craft is a declaration, passing the ritual of a solo exhibition as an antithetical denial of the former self. It is the determination to paint one’s own painting against painting as a norm, and the awakening to create ones own painting as diversion and departure, rather than incorporation and subsumption. This solo exhibition seems to function as an introduction or as a ‘gate’ in the journey to painting, which must be acquired while losing the self as continuity and coherence and the self recognized by others.

Therefore, instead of painting recognizable landscapes, creating a sympathetic atmosphere, and giving them understandable titles, the artist’s paintings that have ‘strange’ titles force the audience to read’ the paintings rather than appreciate them. Given the task of checking the structure and interior of the artist’s work, I first pay attention to the specificity of the titles, which supplements the lack of well-paintedness, which is a consistent feature of this exhibition. For example, Seoul 20/21/22, Dongtan Lake 21, Seokwan 21, Kumho 20, Pocheon 21, New York 19-20, Cheorwon 21, Brooklyn 22, Hwanghak 20, Namhae21 are used as titles. In some cases, a colon (:) is inserted in the middle to supplement the titles. For example, Seoul20: Walkwithoutlegs, Pochen21: The-She-Shoulder-Rock, Seoul22: Ankle-Bone-Hill and The-She-Rib-Waterfall, and Newyork19-20: Belief In A Dot These are the places
the artist visited between 2019 and 2022, the paintings for which no connection can be found between the specified places and the brushstrokes, and the subtitles after the colon are so idiosyncratic that the viewer and reader cannot project/identify themselves with those sentences/phrases.

During the period that almost overlaps with the Covid-19 period, the artist traveled to various places. She painted on small canvases with clearly visible brushstrokes by relying solely on impressions and memories of visiting/ seeing/sensing while rejecting the existing method of painting based on pictures taken with a cell phone or a camera. As if the brushstrokes as memories/impressions needed to be based on physical visits to physical places, the artist used objective names of the places as titles.
The fact that ‘I was there and the claim that I remember this way as a painter is read and perceived through the painting and the title. Like Sseuni (translator: a term commonly used in online communities where users are primarily women) re-experiencing the experience of a certain day and place a long time ago summarized in a few words in a diary, these paintings may function as a sufficient device to open then and there. The round, elongated, spreading, overpainted, and squashed brushstrokes may be some kind of letters, codes, or manuscripts of the mind.

If it hadn’t been for the story the artist told me regarding these small paintings she painted for the past 4 years since 2019, I might have filled this text with those kinds of associations and subjective impressions.
Fortunately, I was able to hear about the incident, and it allowed me to get closer to these deconstructed paintings.
After a car accident in 2016, until she was finally diagnosed with fibromyalgia, the artist went to and fro in all kinds of hospitals, being treated as a liar or a patient suffering from a nameless disease-malingering. I’m going to imagine how that experience had affected the decision of an artist who used to paint well to paint poorly. The texts l’ve read keep telling me how the experience of the ‘subject’ that is being moved here and there without getting a proper diagnosis and the experience of a subject suspected of lying give rise to an opportunity for subjectivization as desubordination. So I will write that the pain, anxiety, shame, and depression Kyeongbin Jeong faced as she wandered through doctors/medical professionals or ward after ward without getting a proper diagnosis since 2017 gave Jeong a chance to paint a different picture.

Fibromyalgia is a disease that has too many definitions such as “an infinite loop of neural circuits that circulate throughout the body,” “not only physical pain, but also emotionally visible problems such as anxiety, depression, cognitive impairment, and concentration loss,” “more than 60% of those suffering from symptoms experience depression,” “a disease that is often mistaken for a malinger,””a pain whose cause is not yet known,” or “a disease with a 9 times higher incidence rate in women than men.” It is an “ambiguous symptom that cannot be clearly defined and is often diagnosed as another disease or symptom because there are too many adjacent diseases or symptoms. The causes of fibromyalgia are so numerous and varied that traffic accidents are one of the dozens of causes. This is the reason why the artist had to visit the cancer ward, receive radiation therapy or MRI(Magnetic Resonance Imaging), and even receive acupuncture and do yoga. A patient/party’s speech about their symptoms can only attain social meaning or medical justification through the listener, but the artist has wasted a considerable amount of time to obtain such recognition: Kyeongbin Jeong experienced failures every time in communication, delivery, and understanding as she suffered from an unknown disease, a disease that mainly affects women, a disease that cannot be cured, thus a disease that doesn’t make money, and a disease/ symptom as a minority.

Although it has improved enough for her to paint, fibromyalgia is still a part of Jeong. It is a name barely given to the unknown and it is a name that represents the heterogeneity of the body. The artist said that she received great comfort as she felt the ‘monument’ as a person at Ground Zero in New York. (Ground Zero, meaning “a place where nuclear bombs exploded and nothing was left” has been appropriated by various historical tragedies/events or activist groups, and Ground Zero in New York refers to the World Trade Center, which collapsed after 9/11). Upon returning, she said that she read The Affect Theory Reader (Duke University Press Books, edited by Melissa Gregg and Gregory Seigworth). The new paintings that started like that, the paintings that filled the ground zero of Kyeongbin Jeong, the paintings the artist called “monumental” paintings, and those small paintings were accumulated and this exhibition was held naturally.

The title of this exhibition, Walkwithoutlegs, marks the impossibility of the former painting method which was based on visiting places, seeing with the eyes, and taking photographs. It is the result of a walk by a person without legs, a person who cannot walk, and therefore a person for whom the premise of seeing and appreciating is gone.
It is a record of how certain people ‘see/sense, those who have lost their health, who have not secured a safe place for seeing and enjoying the subject, who suffer from fibromyalgia, and who have blurred boundaries between the inside and the outside. As exemplified earlier, in some explanatory texts after the colon (:), different parts of the human body such as ‘legs,” ‘shoulder, ‘ankle bone,’ and ‘ribs are transferred to the landscape/ object and become part of it. For example, Seoul 20: Walkwithoutlegs, Pochen21: The-She-Shoulder-Rock, Seoul22: Ankle-Bone-Hill and The-She-Rib-Waterfall. The boundary between subject and object has become blurred, and a part of the artist’s body is transferred to the visible landscape, becoming it, and is even gendered. The ‘artist-me and the outside-you’ coexist in an inseparable
‘relationship’, and therefore it would not be wrong to say that these paintings are honest paintings by a female painter who can no longer paint things seen with the eyes’ premised on the distance and that these are documentation about the state of ‘non-human’ swayed by ‘the other-body-outside. Now the artist can see a lot, excessively, like a crazy person. It became possible to erode and appropriate the landscape paintings of the healthy.
So, she sensed that the granite mountain in an abandoned quarry in Pocheon was slippery” and returned to feminize and materialize the place, leaving evidence. The other day, I listened to a lecture by an enlightened person who said that rock is the ‘body.’ As for the physicality of rock, I may have already read poems of poets in a trance state who always see and feel more.

A new beginning inevitably occurs with the deprivation of losing (part of) the former self. It is not by one’s will or decision. It is because one gets the opportunity to go in a better direction due to the experience one did not seek.
Kyeongbin Jeong said that she would likely be painting such pictures for the next 10 years (soon she will be 30).
Instead of denying or erasing the limit that cannot be escaped, taking it wider and longer, acknowledging its influence and humbly submitting to it. Filling your own ground zero with so many paintings, piling up, building, welcoming. Then becoming something. I don’t know what the name is yet, it will eventually converge to one of the many names now, but that’s not important because a name is a shell that can barely wrap around the undefinable things in the first place.