Emotion becomes color, and color becomes memory.
As a child, I spent time in the mountains because of illness, and there, beyond the deep forest, I found friends in the sound of birds. The sound had no visible form, yet it was unmistakably present, sharing both my pain and my laughter. Now, I translate that birdsong into abstraction and place it on the canvas.
In my work, the stones and stone walls of Jeju symbolize people and society. Like beings that endure by leaning against and relying on one another, I place on the surface the warmth and color expressed through those relationships. What remains are traces of situations and emotions, reconfigured into color and form as a kind of record.
How can one write birdsong? As a child, I was ill for a long time with nephrotic syndrome, and as a last resort my mother took me to seek alternative medicine in the mountains. Ten-year-old me climbed the mountain every day carrying a lunchbox. It was because eating breakfast after climbing the mountain behind us had become a rule. On a road I did not want to take, I walked along among elderly people whose memories had faded, and after two months, I began climbing the mountain alone.
That was when I first heard it. From the deep mountain beyond the ridge came the sound of birds. The birds must always have been there, chattering in that place, but they likely had not been heard over the sound of my own restlessness. I shouted back in a loud voice to the birds in the deep mountain beyond. “Who are you?” Then even the small birds on the ridge where I stood began to speak.
Once I had friends, climbing the mountain became enjoyable. Seeing the reason for the brightness in my face, the director told me to try writing the sound of birds. “How can I write birdsong?” To my hesitation, he said to write it exactly as I felt it. The birdsong I wrote that day was not text but drawing. It was a drawing written in Korean letters.
I paint birdsong. To me, who desperately needed a friend, the invisible chirping of birds suddenly arriving one day from beyond the deep forest was the laughter of friends rising in my classroom. It had no form, yet it was clearly my friend, my world, my universe. I render in abstraction the birdsong that shares both my suffering and my laughter.
And I reconstruct in simple forms and colors the stone walls, plants, and other things I constantly saw growing up in Jeju. The picture plane is composed of stones, plants, and color. At times, depending on the event that responds to the work and on the emotions I feel while working, one element emerges more strongly and becomes emphasized.
The many stones here and there signify people. Though separated and different in form, they are bound together by events and relationships to form a society; at times, the stones become a large rock that brings balance to the composition.
Various plants—grass, branches, stems, and leaf veins—represent the surrounding environment. The plants around the stone walls may appear externally as though they are entangled, hindering one another’s growth and making each other precarious. Yet as fragile beings, they become one another’s strength against the harsh winds of Jeju, bind the stone walls more firmly together, and endure even typhoons.
In my work, birdsong has no visible form, yet it signifies precious things that certainly exist for us. And like stones and grass, even things that do have form are not depicted to describe that form itself, but to express the influence they have on one another. I seek to convey the situation, the feeling, and the emotions of that day.
