Moontan

Sometimes it was just the three of us. Sometimes with a couple more people. An art opening, or a party, or a gig by an unknown musician. We met there, then went on to the next night-time destination. All spontaneous. We ended up by the Han river, near closed historical sites, or at a park somewhere. It feels like we arrived at some kind of islands: separate places but also part of the city at night. The series Moontan (2007) takes place in a park at night. Someone said, “Let’s get a little bit of a moontan” as people might go to sunbathe in the daytime. We stared at the moon. Some of us were just wandering around, some sat down on a piece of cardboard or plastic, in the corner of the park, where nobody could see us. It wasn’t exactly a party or much fun. Perhaps we enjoyed a slight thrill and a strange calming effect from the night-time. We were all over thirty but still felt lost. Perhaps we fancied each other in subtle ways. We had a perfect intimate balance between the three of us, which we didn’t want to break. I sensed we had tacitly agreed that this stroll would carry on nightly, like a habitual ceremony for a few months, until one of us didn’t want to go anymore. The excursion would gradually stop.  

Following the Moontan series, I painted a few pieces on night-time happenings. Prior to Moontan, I worked for a few years on a series called Lomography. These were mostly fully lit daytime landscapes. This was due to the low-tech, Lomo toy camera that I used as a sketch tool. As a reaction to that, I next wanted to paint lightless nights. I wanted to reflect photographic characteristics more explicitly in my painting. Using bright flashlights, I took some photographs as a reference for the Moontan series of paintings. Hence, my visual memory of night-time in the park is different to the actual painting. The distinctive characteristics of photographs taken with flashlights helped me to develop one-scene paintings, after I painted sequential movement in the Lomography Series. As if I were a theatre director arranging actors on stage, I arranged bright-lit figures against a plain black backdrop, and these changes led me to develop my painting practice in future.

Temporarily, my artistic interest in the night-time gradually stopped after my solo exhibition Eat, Sleep, Have Visions in 2008, as my focus shifted to interior art spaces. After having a series of significant late night conversations in Paris (while on residency in 2009), the subject of night-time came back into my work in the form of collaboration with another artist. Things that happen at night, however trivial and mundane, are memorialised as important moments in life. Sometimes a sense of synesthetic memory unexpectedly materialises in my painting.

(2012)

Night in Paris and Night in Seoul 

I planned to do a lot in the summer of 2009, while I was at Cité Internationale des Arts Paris for a two-month artist residency: to make sketches for new paintings, to prepare forthcoming exhibitions, and to travel around the city. In reality, I didn’t go outside my studio and living space much, leaving all the splendid things unseen. The environment of the artist residency encourages us to meet and network with other artists, so I started to hang out with a small group of people there. Spontaneously we came across each other at shows or someone’s open studio. We all had different practices and nationalities. We visited each other’s studios; our conversations became longer and the nights became deeper. It had been a long time since I graduated from art school, when I last exchanged critical ideas about art, and I was deeply fascinated by these artistic dialogues. Being from different cultural backgrounds, we were all intrigued and curious about each other’s thought processes. The limited time in the residency also played a part, encouraging honesty and respect for each other with the sad feeling of a forthcoming farewell.  One or two bottles of wine were there sometimes, but we were more drunk on our conversations than on wine. When dawn came with fatigue, we walked to the River Seine and dropped by whichever deli opened first, getting croissants and coffee, and sharing them near the river or in some random building entrance. 

One of us, a composer and a regular member of the night stroll, suggested a collaboration with me. He was thinking of the idea of ‘a night that is not heavy’ and ‘transparent black’ at that time. He found something in my painting Moontan relevant to his work about the subject of night and blackness. During one night’s gathering, we took turns, playfully painting something on the canvas, and we recorded the sound of the brushstrokes, as an experiment. The rhythm or characteristics of the sound varied depending on the artists: different colours, the shapes of the drawings, and actions of each stroke. A friend who couldn’t participate in this recording experiment that night was able to identify which brushstroke sounds belonged to which artists. It was fascinating to me as a painter who was not familiar with the interpretation of sound, that the gesture of painting directly transferred to sonic experiences. One night, the composer who started the recording experiment, attached a contact microphone to the back of my canvas, and recorded the sound while I was working on my painting. He later used this sound for a new electronic music piece Nightsight.  This experience led to the creation of a collaborative work in which the audience listens to his music while looking at my painting. 

My collaborator had an opportunity to come to Seoul to work. He collected the sounds of small alleys, restaurants, streets and bridges crossing the Han river, and added these sounds for the next version of Nightsight. I selected two paintings to accompany Nightsight: Night Tree and one of the paintings from the Moontan series without figures, to emphasise the deafened space of blackness itself, and the movement of the brushstrokes instead of reading any narrative into the painting. The experience of this collaboration influenced my work, maybe indirectly in all its aspects. Listening to the low humming sound from Nightsight through the headphones while staring into the space of my painting, I felt as though the space were extending, becoming endlessly deeper and wider. That significant experience led me to more clearly perceive space in my work.  I became more interested in adapting the wall, on which paintings are hung in order to extend the space inside the canvas. These collaborative experiences also change the dimension of my paintings; they became larger after 2010.

(2012)

Happy New Night

It was the second time that I had experienced New Year’s Eve (in German, it is called Silvester) at Nürnberg. The sound of fireworks is heard day and night from all directions. Approaching midnight, smoke and fireworks explode even more frequently on the streets. Previously, I had watched the display from my window at home. This time, I decided to go to the nearby park to greet the New Year. 

The park was on a gentle slope. People with winter coats, carrying bits and bobs, a few beers, started to walk up the hill. It was quite refreshing to wander in the dark, in the chill winter forest, with random people. It would have been scary to walk there by myself. Colourful fireworks started to illuminate the sky. During the countdown to the New Year, explosions from near and far made thunderous noises. At midnight, thick smoke hid the other people. With the bursting lights, I could faintly see the shape of men and women, and sometimes excited children running around. I had aticipated the fireworks, but experiencing flashes of bright pink, green, and orange in the dense fumes was also enjoyable. It must be terrible for small animals living in the forest at Silvester. I heard that there were proposals to prohibit fireworks because dogs are agitated and startled by the noise. 

Wandering around with the flashes, explosions, and smoke, I thought of something: familiar images of war. In fact, my senses were hyperactive from the roar and unbreathable heavy smoke. This entertainment seemed to be a fake uproar, only without conflict or danger. Some people were popping firecrackers that were quite threatening; they seemed to enjoy the feeling of firing bombs at invisible enemies. I thought that the firecrackers were made not only for the purpose of having enjoyable colourful lights, but also to bring the great pleasure of participating in a destructive action while making light. I suddenly remembered a phrase that I read not long ago, from Yuval Noah Harari’s book Sapiens: “When humans domesticated fire, they gained control of an obedient and potentially limitless force.” I wondered if this New Year’s event was a ritual to make various shapes from fire, as a “limitless force.”

I took a few pictures on my mobile phone while I walked back home, after half an hour of 2019. The lit-up town seen from the hill was spectacular. With a winter-forest backdrop, the crowds of people randomly scattered around were beautiful as they watched the fireworks popping. The picture I took was blurred because of the darkness and the smoke, and it was difficult to see what those people looked like, or what they were doing. I could continue my limitless imaginings through these obscure images and blurred silhouettes of trees and figures. 

(2019)