걷다 보니 당신의 마음 속이네: 구명선

Written by: Park Young Taek (Kyonggi University Professor)

Title: Eyes that Reach the Unknown Horizon

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

For many years, drawing was considered the means for making a rough sketch, an incomplete painting, or simply the basis for making an artwork. It was deemed to be something deficient, a surplus of things, and insufficient. Nevertheless, drawing seeks to build a fulfilling life and the world in itself. Drawings that unfurl fresh visuals with simple tools on flat paper is now being reinterpreted by many artists for its agility, speed, and convenience. If Korean contemporary art is armed with overwhelming scale, spectacular visuals, stunning logic and concept, technology and technical, artificial media, then plain drawings paradoxically remove extravagance and take light steps to open up numerous possibilities with new images. The art of drawing is leaving a trajectory in its journey of wading forward by relying on the artist's body and senses and the most fundamental art medium. Drawings that even reveal the trembling strokes of the artist to viewers are considered to have passed through an individual's body. Although we cannot precisely identify what that trembling is, it comes to viewers with curious vigor and uniqueness. It is the so-called "second body."

Ku Myung Seon draws only with simple, plain media like paper, a 4B Tombow pencil, and an eraser. They are monochrome paintings created by using varying tones of the color black. She uses the so-called college entrance examination style, which involves repeating lines, erasing, and rubbing. Ku draws women's faces using plaster head drawing techniques or college entrance test techniques that were tamed for years and can do well on. This means she is making pencil drawings that she has trained for a long time. It is the media she can certainly handle well and is the most confident of. This is undoubtedly an intentional and strategic choice. Ku produces extraordinary drawings by fully using the methodology of plaster head drawings or the college entrance exam-style drawings and the characteristics of pencils. In fact, she wants to demonstrate her talent for drawing. Let us take a moment to think about pictures you can draw using just a pencil. Leading pencil drawing masters come up to my mind: Won Sukyun, who drew precision drawings of ants and axes; Choi Byungso, who covered newspaper surfaces in black with pencil and ended up rupturing the surface; Park Mi-Hyun, who drew geometric shapes with mechanical pencils on Korean paper; Lee Hi-Yong, who drew just ceramics with regular pencils; Kim Eunju, who took the darkness of graphite to the extreme; Kim Myungsook, who used conté, among other media, to depict giant faces and abyss in a sublime way; and Yoon Hyang-Lan, who used alluring long lines. Ku Myung Seon draws fictional girls using a 4B Tombow drawing pencil we are all familiar with. She uses plaster head drawing techniques to create mid-tones, shadows, and highlights in black and white photos to draw women who resemble Asian cartoon characters. She then borrows these characters to project her memories and feelings on them. Characters who look like the lead character of romance comics with eyes like windows appear rather chillingly in a somewhat dreamlike atmosphere with dramatic handling of contrast and light.

Ku reportedly likes to record her emotions, feelings, and impression of things. She goes through her memos and visualizes specific images that she naturally draws on paper. Then she returns to her notes and chooses the title that best fits the picture from them. Her drawings are highly conceptual, developed from sentences that come to her mind at that moment to rather vague memories and feelings. She says drawing is not a reproduction of objects on paper but an act of visualizing ideas about the subject or incidents. She actually likens her drawings to "scratching a white wall as if you are inflicting a wound." What she does is show the notions that already exist inside, making invisible things visible, and managing to visualize intimate feelings and fading memories. In Ku's drawings, the gestures and facial expressions of girls/women who look like the heroines of romance comics and the dark background symbolize just that. Enchanting and irresistible beauty or a face full of complicated feelings, figures with gloomy looks are not portraying real world people, but virtual figures Ku imagined and actors in a TV series she made up on her own. The background is either a solid dark or an ambiguous place. This damp setting in the dead of night, where lights flicker by the wind or shine brightly, is surrounded by a very surreal, funny energy and uncanny haze.

Images of women in imaginations and fantasies

Ku Myung Seon says she borrowed the drawing style of romance comics she loved as a young girl. Images of idealized women with dreamy facial expressions, long faces, huge eyes without pupils, sharp chins that make the women look arrogant, slender necklines and sunken collarbones, lean bodies, long hair hanging loosely, and extravagant, sexy clothes that evoke certain feelings. The upper body of female characters looks identical but distinct from one another simultaneously. The long sentences Ku picked as the title of her drawings are the proof. She maximizes her emotions with sensible titles that she finds in everyday life. These women are virtual characters that she developed and some kind of avatars representing her thoughts and feelings. Ku first "adopts sample images of women" from magazines, "Internet games, and catalogs and modifies based on images of girl characters in the manga that best fit her own emotions to create new characters," or she creates images of women from her imagination or fantasy. The girls/women characters made this way convey the emotional state she experiences daily. They become the character dressed in clothes corresponding to specific scenes, making the facial expression that suits her emotion on that particular day, and impersonating the person in a dramatic moment. Her works remind me of the female characters in Cindy Sherman's photos. She uses these actresses to portray a particular scene in a TV series. The girls/women project typical images of women expressing peculiar emotions that you cannot pinpoint. 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