I like driving eastward on the Gangbyeon Expressway in the middle of the night. I always take the far right lane, with the Han river right at my fingertips, and watch the city lights glimmering on the dark surface of the night’s waters. I’ve always been intrigued by the night scenery, especially that in Vincent van Gogh’s works – whether they are of a narrow path lined with cypress trees unwinding in the dark woods, outdoor cafe lit up after sunset, or stars sparkling against the night sky, they captivated my heart like nothing else before. Interestingly enough, I would remember these paintings of nightscapes much more vividly, in so much more detail than I would ever an actual nightscape that I actually saw. I believe visual encounter of the world through a painting than in reality can be much more powerful at times, as it has been for me with Van Gogh’s works, because of the complex and multi-sensual experience that it can provide. I stop to smoke a cigarette at the Hangang Park in Nanji near my temporary studio where I spent most of the summer to paint. Taking a night stroll at the park has become a regular pastime.
While in conversation with an art critic a few years back, I was asked why I chose painting over all other mediums. He asked me something to the effect, “Painting used to be the sole means of creating an image, but in the highly modernized world that we live in today, it has become a fraction of the vast variety of mediums an artist can use, many much more efficient, such as film and photography only to name a few. Its significance has withered to a point where we aren’t sure if we can even place contemporary painting and the traditional painting of the past under the same category. In this undeniable reality, what do you claim is the reason that painting should prevail?” I could not find an answer to this question that I myself could accept. Hence this question of “why I paint” has long lingered, and only recently I’ve come to a rather resigned conclusion: from the beginning I chose painting and that I can paint. I have always painted because I had to, driven by this feeling of destiny and inevitability that I always had deep within my soul, and therefore any debate on the efficiency and effectiveness of painting is utterly irrelevant. Equation of productivity cannot be applied to painting, or any form of art, to measure its value. To analyze the validity of painting, a tool of expression which has existed since the beginning of human civilization, in the 21st century, the right question to ask would not be “how productive” but “how beautiful.” Unfortunately for me and my fellow painters, the latter question leaves us in the middle of an even more complicated labyrinth. How beautiful is my painting?
I read in an online article recently, it reported that in a survey asking people which occupation they considered people are the happiest the number one answer was “artist” (e.g. poet, painters etc.). Of all my peers in high school and university, I was one of the very few that stuck with their childhood dream to become a painter. I work 70 hours per week on average, far exceeding the legal working hours that the government is trying to enforce at 52 hours per week. Painting over seven hours a day and teaching about twenty hours a week, the life of an artist – especially before an exhibition – is no joke. The only sport I follow is MMA (mixed martial arts). It’s amazing to watch the fighters with perfect physique as well as mental strength that can only be acquired through long hardcore training, fighting like predators on the ring like their lives depend on it. The fighters seem to exuberate a special kind of energy that enables them to overcome reality, the same kind that brings the artists to create inspirational works. A painter is in an intense fight with himself as he concentrates all his internal emotions, sensations and motivations into the stroke of the brush, and the physical and mental energy that has accumulated with each stroke will push him to exceed himself through his work. I trained like athletes and musicians to acquire the painting techniques that I have now. It is interesting to note that the instruments used to paint today is not much different from those used by Masaccio over 600 years ago to paint the cathedral walls. It is the unfortunate but inevitable fate of all painters to compete with not only the peers of their time but also the ghosts of all the masters and their immortal masterpieces in the long history of painting.
I stand in front of my canvas with a brush in hand for hours everyday to capture the Muse, an inspiration that appears without warning only to spare me a short moment; assuming I paint until I’m 75, 7 hours a day, it adds up to 89,425 hours, which is equivalent of 10 years of the 35 years I have left in my life that I will spend alone in my studio. Maybe, in the rosy future, years later when most of my friends with other jobs have retired, I will have become a successful artist in terms of fame and wealth. In the same article about the “seemingly happiest” job was another survey on actual job satisfaction, and artists came in 28th. A sad reality, but I cannot stop painting, because I have to prove with my life that the lonesome path that I chose to take was worth something great. I have always painted, and I’m good at it. But I can’t help ask myself once again; why do I paint?
Last summer was long and hot. My grandmother passed away on another scorching day towards the end of the summer; it was the first time experiencing the grief of losing a family member. She took care of me when I was young, and sometimes when I see my mother looking after my newborn son, I see her and myself as a little boy. I don’t know if art can change the world, but I believe it can save me. I also dream of passing to my little boy the talent that I may have inherited from my grandmother. A Woody Allen quote from ‘Manhattan’ comes to mind, comparing life to resort food that lacks both quality and quantity, that life is “full of loneliness, and misery, and suffering, and unhappiness, and it’s all over much too quickly.” I head home, feeling the autumn night’s cold air on my back. Backlights of a slick sports car leave behind a long backlit shadow as it speeds off on the empty road, while streetlamps glisten through the thick leaves. The bright city lights sparkle like stars in the dark and then slowly fade away, dissolving into the wet air of the autumn night.
- Dong Wook Suh
Press release courtesy ONE AND J. Gallery.