Walking a Walk

Kaeun Park

2022

Kyeongbin Jeong paints the scenery she saw in the past. The scenery varies from the land she looked down from an airplane during her trip to the United States, to a grass she encountered at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, to roses blooming by an alleyway wall, to valley rocks she found on a hike. One peculiar thing is that the artist paints these natural objects by relying solely on her memory, without the aid of other recording media such as photos or videos. The title of the exhibition, Walkingwithoutlegs, refers to the unique process of once again walking through the past scenery in the artist’s head.

The artist often thinks of a human body or imagines its gender while looking at natural objects encountered in daily life. Loose hair-like grass, a tree growing like long, hard, white ribs, and a rock that looks like a girl’s back. As a result, the artists paintings seem to be more mindful of sensitively capturing such observations rather than being an objective representation of landscape. For example, Pocheon22: The She-Shoulder-Rock, painted after visiting a quarry in Pocheon, shows a completely different image from the common imagery of a quarry. Countless hard and strong lines of various shades such as white, purple, and brown overlap to form the surface of the rock, and green lines flow down like a stream of water between the rocks. The usual dry, rough gray and dark straight lines created by sharply broken edges cannot be found in this image. On the other hand, the canvas, which is far smaller than the actual rock walls, also tries to evoke another sense through changes in scale.

The image reconstructed only by memory, the persistent search for the body and physical properties, and the effect of the resulting affect have been the artist’s constant interests. For example, the green canvases that filled the gallery’s three walls in the exhibition Shadow (Instant Roof, 2020) were created while contemplating the affect that occurs when the body of the audience encounters the canvas. And, like the works in this exhibition, the paintings were painted based solely on memory. However, compared to the exhibition two years ago, there are certain characteristics that stand out only in Walkingwithoutlegs. By calling the process of painting the time and space experienced by the artist in the past “walking”, the artist is actively bestowing another “temporality” to her work process. In other words, for her, the process of her work is a certain “time experience” beyond the process of making a painting, and that experience is as important as the result on the canvas. Then, it seems somewhat incomplete to interpret Kyeongbin Jeong’s work as simply “abstract” within the context of painting, or merely to describe the work as an “image” of reproducing the real world in her own way. Perhaps what is missing in this explanation is the question of walking itself. What is happening in Walkingwithoutlegs? What kind of relationship does that walk have with the walks you have experienced in the past?

We often use photography as a medium to record outdoor landscapes. The moment the picture is taken, the image of the outside world viewed from a fixed point of view is transferred into the camera. In addition, each picture is stored in sequence, without interfering with each other, following the principle of “one after another”. However, the artist’s body operates on a completely different principle. In her memory, one walk she experienced in the past overlaps and combines with another experience she remembers. (The memory space where this happens is not a solid drawer where you can easily take out and put things you need as you wish, but rather a temporary and flimsy, like the “wound bandage” that the artist once mentioned, and even some materials can penetrate them.) The artist’s Walkingwithoutlegs can then be seen as an experience of walking through a unique time and space where various types of land, natural objects, people, and objects overlap.

The audience facing the artist’s painting is sometimes placed in a situation where it is impossible to specify what landscape and what object it deals with. For example, in the case of Seoul21: Green of Seoul, there are few clues about where her walk actually took place and what natural objects the painting is centered on. When looking at a painting in which a dark green triangular shape fills the center of the canvas, some may think that the green part is a mountain, while others may say that it is a plant growing on a wall. On the other hand, this cannot be seen as an incomplete reading due to a lack of information. Rather, it is pointless to attempt to specify a single original. This is because her legless walk is a time that breaks down the familiar sense of physicality and scale, a single species, a linear time, one decisive moment. It is up to the audience who have now acquired another space and time, the exhibition space, to explore how to take this walk together.