걷다 보니 당신의 마음 속이네: 구명선

Written by: Park Young Taek (Professor of Kyonggi University)

Title: Eyes that Reach the Unknown Horizon

"Your eyes are so deep my memory is lost there." - Louis Aragon

Drawing has long been considered as a rough sketch, an incomplete painting, or simply the basis for making an artwork. It was seen as deficient or surplus. Today, artists reinterpret it as a means to create vibrant, immediate visuals on flat paper, and is valued for its agility, speed and convenience.

The grand scale of Korean contemporary art. Armed with spectacular visuals and technological complexity are impressive. Paradoxically, simple drawings remove extravagance, subtly opening new visual possibilities.

Drawing traces a path driven by the artist's body and senses, using the most basic medium. Even trembling strokes convey the artist's physical presence, offering viewers a sense of a "second body" full of curiosity and uniqueness. 

Ku Myung Seon uses simple media; Paper, 4B Tombow pencil, and an eraser, to create monochrome black-toned drawings. She uses the so-called college entrance exam techniques of repeated lines, erasing, and rubbing to capture women's faces with plaster head or exam-style methods, which she has refined over years. This deliberate, strategic choice, showcases her confidence in these traditional, straightforward media. 

Consider the art of pencil drawing: masters like Won Sukyun, known for precise ants and axes; Choi Byungso, who covered newspaper with black pencil; Park Mi-Hyun, who drew geometric shapes with mechanical pencils on Korean paper; Lee Hi-Yong, who focused on ceramics with regular pencils; Kim Eunju, pushing the darkness of graphite to the extreme; Kim Myungsook, who used conté to depict giant faces and abyss in a sublime way; and Yoon Hyang-Lan, known for alluring long lines.

Ku Myung Seon uses a 4B Tombow pencil and plaster head techniques to create black-and-white images of women resembling Asian cartoon characters. Using her selection of materials, her images have mid-tones, shadows, and highlights. She projets her memories and emotions onto these figures: characters who look like the lead character of romance comics with eyes like windows, to appear rather chillingly in a  dreamlike atmosphere with dramatic handling of contrast and light.

Ku records her emotions and impressions, then visualises specific images from her notes. She then selects titles that best fit these images. Her highly conceptual drawings stem from spontaneous sentences, vague memories and feelings. Ku says drawing is not a reproduction of objects on paper but an act of visualizing ideas about the subject or incidents. She compares her drawings to "scratching a white wall as if you are inflicting a wound." Her work reveals internal notions, making invisible feelings and fading memories visible, often using romantic comic-like women and dark backgrounds to symbolize these themes. 

Gloomy figures with complex expressions are not real people but virtual characters from Ku's imagined TV series. Set against dark or ambiguous backgrounds, this damp, nighttime scene with flickering or shining lights exudes surreal, humorous, and uncanny energy. 

Images of women in imaginations and fantasies

Ku Myung Seon borrows the style of romance comics she loved as a young girl. Images of idealized women with dreamy expressions, elongated faces, large pupil-less eyes, sharp chins suggesting arrogance, slender necklines, sunken collarbones, lean bodies, long flowy hair, and provocative attire. While their upper bodies appear similar, each character remains distinct.

Ku's long titles reveal her emotional expression, using realistic titles inspired by daily life. Her female characters are digital avatars representing her thoughts and feelings. Ku first collects sample images of women from magazines, internet games, and catalogs and uses manga characters as the core to create new characters, or she creates images of women from her imagination and fantasy.

The female characters embody her daily emotional state. They characters dress corresponding to specific scenes, with expressions matching her feelings and dramatizing key moments. 

Her work ehcoes Cindy Sherman's female characters, using actresses to portray scenes from a TV series. The women evoke ambiguous, hard-to-identify emotions. 

Albeit beautiful, Ku's girls/women born from black graphite harbor something that looks indifferent. They are a type of narcissistic character or Ku's self-portraits that secretly reveal her hidden feelings. They objectify women's bodies and emotions to what they are like while exploring various possibilities regarding their visual representation. The women's faces and bodies generate mysterious power as they turn up like ghosts in front of black darkness. Through drawings of girls/women, she seeks to transform constantly to recover her memories and feelings while playing a game of performing herself in them. That is, a type of game that she sows seeds of her feelings, ego, and elegant, ideal self in drawings.

The spellbinding girls/women illuminate the darkness elegantly and glamorously. They exist like immaterial spirits instead of bodies with tangible forms. Their faint faces, like those in an age-old black-and-white photo, create a gloomy day ambiance. Their bodies are slightly distorted and generate certain feelings together with their eyes and lights. This light that highlights the surreal quality of Ku's drawings is used to create the theatrical effect, used in flashes in the eyes often seen in exaggerated eyes of female characters in romance comics. The light is also represented as something well-mixed with things that objects in the drawings lack (shadows, darkness). The light and darkness mingle together to create a world.

Then you realize that the faces of the girls/women are merely masks. The empty eyes. Where have the eyes gone? Eyes have their own identity as physical substances. They are things that make a person unique. Eyes are also something that cannot be replaced. Sometimes they are replaced with tears and flashes of light. In Ku's drawings, intense lights instruct something in place of the eyes. It is true that you can read people's feelings by looking at their eyes, but they also "hide true feelings with countless possibilities for interpreting their meaning" (Suh Dongwook).

The young women in Ku's drawings all have large eyes, but they are obscure eyes. They are so deep you cannot interpret the accurate meaning. It is just impossible to figure out the underlying feeling because so many intense, undulating emotions are tangled within. For me, people's eyes represent a "void" that you cannot fathom the depth nor decipher the meaning of. This is why people's eyes are a maze. The women in Ku's drawings emanate delicate emotions and mentalities that are unmeasurable and unfathomable through their eyes/lights. They are such eyes and hearts that language cannot define or reenact. Those eyes are unusually big, long, and without pupils, manifesting themselves through light. As such, they just shimmer for a fleeting moment. Ku intends to draw such eyes. Eyes that evoke and remember a slew of memories and baffling feelings, those puzzling eyes. They bring our eyes to reach the horizon we never knew existed before.

Monthly Art, December 2016