Exhibition Information

Before Tomorrow Comes
2021 (출처= 성곡미술관) Ink and Color on Korean paper 100×136㎝

			Jaeyoung Min uses paper, brush and ink to depict relatable scenes from the everyday life of modern people, such as a scene in a crowded subway carriage, cars on a congested road during rush hour, students wearing school uniforms on their way to school, a politician in an interview, young people dancing and having fun at a club, and people walking in the park. Having majored in oriental painting, she utilizes the traditional oriental painting medium of hanji as well as touches of ink wash that convey her very breaths to paint everyday situations that she personally experienced. However, her landscapes of daily life are somewhat different from traditional oriental paintings. It is because she paints from landscapes of metropolitan daily life that are typically relatable to modern people, overlapping black horizontal brushstrokes in ink wash that evenly traverse across the entire canvas with pixel-like strokes of primary colors in “Digital RGB” and intentionally experimenting with the effects of the mixed colors.
 
What does Min ultimately aim to express through these attempts? The artist seeks to find the various meanings of being human that are deeply hidden in the habitual and meaningless movements of life and daily routine among modern people who reside in metropolises such as Seoul. On the highly sensitive skin of hanji, which presents the ideal surface for hiding these things, Min creates countless brushstrokes and splotches of ink wash that generate a sense of blurriness, ambiguity and softness, as well as a created space where meanings may have escaped to, or conversely, a sense of leisureliness that allows the infiltration of meanings. This is precisely the source of the creativity and freshness behind Min’s artwork. Instead of the flat, hard, cold and bland nature of digital images, Min’s breaths that encompass both hanji and traditional ink seek to recover lost but fond recollections, or memories and traces of beings who were once close to us, which now reside in our unconscious as Min’s contemporaries, through the effects of distance and depth of living spaces.
 
Min explores a new, experimental way of painting that surpasses the conventional drawing techniques in traditional paintings, where her paintings reveal her wish to discover the force of life.
 
This exhibition reflects the past two decades in the life of the artist Jaeyoung Min.