Painting as a Practice of Everyday Mourning
Lee Yeonsook (Rita)
I must confess that it was only after visiting Leeje’s studio and listening to an account of her twenty years as a painter that I arrived at the realization that her entire practice is, above all else, an act of mourning—one that continues throughout a lifetime in response to loss. It was an insight that gently cut through the question of why a painter of such remarkable skill repeatedly settles within and departs from the territory of a consistent personal style. As we know, the familiar formula of loss and mourning runs as follows: the lost object leaves within us a wound that can neither be repaired nor restored. We willingly choose to be transformed according to the shape of that wound. Seen in this light, the painter’s orientation, their commitment not to mastery, completion, and perfection as a “great artist,” but rather to the cultivation of voluntary loss, amateuristic excitement, and the pleasures of experimentation, may ultimately stem from a long-standing identification with the lost object itself. Though not always the case, the loss of distance from an other who places the subject at risk is also one of the minimal conditions under which ethics emerges. The death of a close friend; the redevelopment of a hometown neighborhood; the social disasters and deaths that have unfolded in South Korean society over the past decades as though they were ordinary occurrences—these traumas, and the melancholy that follows from them, constitute the fundamental ground upon which Leeje’s paintings are built. Viewed in this context, Leeje’s paintings are not expressions of sentimental melancholy. Rather, they function as an archive that captures, preserves, and carries the affective traces of collective loss. Through the indirect route, medium, and method of painting, Leeje is unmistakably speaking of all those deaths. We spoke about funerals in her studio. And about the countless deaths we had witnessed, directly and indirectly, over the past decade. Pinned to the studio wall was a low-resolution image that looked as though it had been screenshot from an Instagram Reel. It showed villagers burying the carcass of a loggerhead sea turtle that had washed ashore near Pohang. “In the video, one resident dug a deep pit in the sand, buried the turtle, and carefully covered it with soft sand after removing the larger stones. The turtle’s head was positioned toward the sea. Hwang explained, ‘There is a saying that the spirit returns to the sea only if the head faces the water. It means that even in death, it should continue its journey toward the sea.’” To speak of respect for life may sound obvious, even banal. Yet it is painful and solitary to ask how we might mourn and bury, together, lives that are ground down and discarded rather than grieved under the imperatives of capital’s relentless acceleration and expansion—lives not unlike our own. Naturally, mourning continues after death. The world continues. Life continues. But how? It seems to me that this is where Leeje’s concern lies. Painting is one possible answer to that question.
With these basic considerations in mind, let us turn to The World Goes On series. Although presented as a series, The World Goes On appears less as a unified body of work than as a discontinuous chain of images that share little in the way of subject matter or theme beyond their common scale. In discussions of Leeje’s paintings, the art-historical categories of figuration and abstraction have frequently been invoked. At first glance, they seem to offer a stable point of entry into this seemingly disorderly assemblage of images. Unfortunately, however, such an approach soon proves to be a misunderstanding, or perhaps a misjudgment. This is because the works in the series follow a consistent process: a foundational layer is first established, upon which contingent and improvisational elements are subsequently added. As a result, classifications based on the presence or absence of recognizable forms ultimately fail to grasp what is in fact the crucial distinction between these paintings, namely, that their differences lie primarily in stages of development rather than in genre. In this sense, the categories of figuration and abstraction are of little, if any, use when approaching Leeje’s series. Moreover, because figurative and abstract elements coexist even within a single canvas, individual images often resemble fictional or dreamlike scenes in which fact (or memory) and imagination are freely and confusingly intertwined, much like a dream from the night before. Faces and places emerge faintly, like afterimages, only to fade away once more. As with all dreams, once we awaken, only an atmosphere, a texture, a feeling remains scattered around us. Leeje’s series captures such remnants, fragments, and residues of absence through a dialectical and repetitive movement of “painting and erasure ,” opening a passage toward the “intermediate realm ” that the artist calls “dirty gray.” Perhaps the "intermediate realm"—a term that encapsulates Leeje’s overall artistic approach—is an abstract, even utopian space that preserves the bodily, tactile, and material affective energies of the "remainder": that which has not been fully sublimated or translated into meaning and language, much like the bardo of Tibetan Buddhism. At the same time, it is a space of suspended judgment, one that renders the operation of binary classificatory systems impossible from the outset. It is also a space of retreat and refuge, choosing to remain in states of incompletion and irresolution rather than advancing toward closure. It is precisely the ambiguity of this “gray zone ,” where the subject’s agency and the passivity demanded by the other continually collide, intertwine, and unfold, that lies at the heart of the painterliness toward which Leeje’s series aspires. The term “painterly,” often used to describe images rich in tactile textures, colors, and modes of depiction, can, from certain perspectives, carry a pejorative implication: that a work may be merely “pseudo-painting” rather than “real” painting. Yet it is precisely for this reason that a flexible, mutable, and expansive experience of painting offers viewers—and, perhaps above all, the artist—a truth that operates on the affective, intuitive, and bodily level, making it possible to paint life through painting and, conversely, to discover painting within life. It is a moment of raw, low, and amateuristic encounter, one that a “real” painting, neatly framed and suspended within the white cube, can scarcely hope to provide. Although it cannot be discussed at length here, this series also includes images that appear “typically” abstract, works that might be more aptly described as paintings than as pictures. The various movements generated through the material properties of paint and the physical support of the canvas—shaped contingently, improvisationally, and variably by conditions such as gravity, time, and space—can at times resemble an appropriation or parody of abstract art. At the same time, they can also be experienced as records of an improvised performance, a kind of visual “jam” produced through the interaction of disparate elements. These quasi-abstract experiments lend the series as a whole a rhythm grounded in the absence of overt content.
If painterliness is a term that points to the intermediary passage, space, or mode of mediation that Leeje’s series creates between everyday life and art, then the same argument may also be approached through the form of the series itself. Unified in a square format, The World Goes On at times resembles a collection of personal images, memes, or screenshots casually arranged within an Instagram feed. As is well known, a “screenshot,” a term primarily associated with digital environments, refers both to the act of extracting a particular image from a larger visual field or isolating a still image from a moving sequence, and to the resulting image itself. How such a claim might be received by an artist like Leeje, for whom the designation of painter remains entirely appropriate in the artisanal sense, is difficult to say. After all, it invokes digital technologies capable of reproducing screens infinitely with nothing more than the click of a button. Depending on one’s generation, those screens may no longer even be considered part of the “real world.” Yet as a visual unit that makes an image, once experienced and possessed only from a first-person perspective, available for “equal” sharing among countless others, the screenshot has become one of the most tangible mediators through which a certain low-grade form of democracy is enacted today. Consider, for example, the long strings of KakaoTalk screenshots shared as “supporting evidence.” No matter how justified such disclosures may be in the name of the public good, the screenshot, under these conditions, reduces secrecy—an absolute other—to the status of information fit only for a “like” (or a “dislike”). In doing so, it erases the distinction between the two parties and performs the same act of sabotage against every secret in the world. And yet, setting aside such painstaking compilations of “supporting evidence,” the screenshot clearly has another side. Screenshot, for instance, preserves and records those intensely contingent, glitch-like moments of contact and connection encountered within digital environments—moments that therefore seem almost magical. We remember, with something like the forgetfulness of dementia, that this was once the real reason we went online at all, and we do so only through those “classic screenshots” that continue to circulate. Needless to say, we are not the protagonists of those screenshots. And yet, through the screenshot—which solidifies and circulates fleeting moments of internet intimacy as image files, turning them into a kind of currency—we discover meanings of our own within them, much as we do when entering into a personal relationship with a film. The gentle freedom afforded by mediated experience through the screenshot makes possible a shifting of positions between “you” and “me,” much as literature has always done. A similar experience can be found in Leeje’s series. The visual, sensory, and affective layers that constitute the world Leeje has “screenshot” are gently dispersed across the surface of the canvas. The absence of specific events, forms, or information functions instead as a gap, a silence, a space that activates the viewer’s own memories, experiences, and imagination. In this way, painting willingly transforms itself into a means of sustaining life, mourning, and the world. Finally, a note on the square format that unifies the series. As is well known, the square readily evokes the visual logic of the Instagram feed. Yet, as seen in The World Goes On: River, it is also the size of Post-it notes commonly found at memorial gatherings and public vigils. Through this association, the series invites viewers to see the square as a form of everyday mourning. This is, unmistakably, a painterly act of resistance against the affectless egalitarianism of the Instagram feed.
Lee Yeonsook (Rita) (Writer, Critic)
