SHADOW WITH TIME
Blooming and Withering Flower

The difference between a painting and a text is that the painting stands still in a place. Both the painting and the text are created within times, but the painting seems stationary. The viewers sometimes feel paintings come to life, but for most of the audiences, the paintings are just a stationary object. Dragging countless hours, a painting gets completed and becomes a stationary object. Would not this be a reason for a lot of contemporary people finding paintings complicated?

Ever since being in the field of Arts, the most frequently asked question from others in South Korea was, “what do you feel when you look at paintings?”. When we learn about paintings, we often hear that we have to understand the artist’s perspective and views towards the world. However, how can we understand something from paintings when they do not speak? this is really complicated. On the other hand, a novel is not a big deal to be read through boring prints on a two-dimensional plane. What would be the reason for paintings that they are relatively difficult compare to novels?

A writer expresses his or her perspectives and points of view in a novel through many ways. There are several factors that support the writer’s thoughts such as a character of a protagonist, relationships between characters, a narrator, background, events, narrative styles and etc. The audience can dive into the writer’s set-up and fully understand the story by enjoy reading all the factors. This is not a difficult thing to do, as only a tiny bit of effort and time of reading the listed characters are required.

So, a novel narrates with a descriptive voice about situations, emotions and events that change through a plot of a story, whereas a painting never let you know easily. This is also the reason for famous paintings earnig their fame – the narrative of them become even more intimate after repeatably shown in educational institutions and in news.

The painting that is just standing still without saying anything is deficient to stop and hold busy modern people for a while. Hence, I would like to give a narrative to the painting. Perhaps it is a matter of course that humans living in times feel a sense of closeness with things in time, like different impressions we have in between stationary objects and alive animals or growing and withering plants that might seem stationary.


Then how would it be to capture the artist’s time and alive time on a stationary plane? The series of paintings <Blooming and Withering Flower> depict the thoughts above.  

<Blooming and Withering Flower>

What sets modern sources of light apart from their predecessors, such as the sun or a candle, is that they do not move nor change with time.

Despite the evident benefits of light bulbs, what I cannot find in them are signs of vitality. In mother nature, the vitality comes from the fact that they change over time. Each carries traces of time, which makes them seem alive. However, such a trait is not present in artificial sources of light. They do not seem to interact with time.

Similarly, shadows born at night are fixed, unlike those continuously changing their shapes and directions under daylight on the streets or the walls.

By recording shadows of blooming and withering flowers, I strive to capture the concept of time, which flows like a river on us and the universe, on a two-dimensional plane. Also, only artificial light sources were used to shed shadows on and record the flowers' changes over time. Contrast exists between the human-created way of life, represented by light bulbs, and how nature abides by time, shown by the flowers' movements. By bringing this contrast to a single scene, I seek to integrate and understand these two different natures of life existing in a single world.

Blooming and withering peony 01

Withering tulips 01
56x76cm