I’m interested in heaviness and lightness of painting. I feel a burden of its heaviness from material and depth of history. It is the format of canvas that I find most required studio space and masculinity to stretch the over-sized canvas. I always think it is like a power play between I and gigantic wall sized canvases. Whenever I grapple with canvas, I want to experiment on how to shift canvas painting into the compact, mobile, formless object.
I’d like to say that the 100 Folding Painting project needs failure of studio practice before start. When I saw the stacked large sized paintings in the corner of my studio that I am often ashamed of the image, I wanted to give an opportunity to the failures to be shown in a different way not in a gallery, but public space with complex layers of historical and political contexts. The process is documented with an unattended video camera set on a tripod.
In the performance video, it was very interesting that there was a subtle tension from the contrast between a performer who folds a painting using a very easy, compact, individual, feminine (as gender) way of making art and the place where has been changed and developed with a masculine, massive, heavy industrial and complicated method having political, economic issues. They seem that both are changing the world but trying in different attitudes at the same place.
I aim to open up a wider sense of how painting practice can be understood today. Switching between conventional painting practice and unconventional and critical painting project, I want to expand my practice to a new genre and new audience. Two methods are not contradictory of one another, it is more of a coexistent state that will nourish my work.
Feb.2012