Naesoong: Strange or Familiar (Black and White)

There are moments when the face you have looked at longest suddenly turns unfamiliar.
Hidden inside the familiar self is a stranger.

The 〈Naesoong Story〉 series first began from a heart wounded by people whose faces differed from their backs. I painted figures while observing other people’s feigned innocence, and I used my own face as the model simply because it was the easiest to study. Then, late one night in the studio, the face in the mirror, the photograph, and the Naesoong girl in the painting seemed to overlap. I realized, belatedly, that the figure I had taken for someone else’s story was in fact my own image.

〈Coy: Familiar but Unfamiliar〉 began at that moment, when a gaze directed at others turned back toward myself. The self we show to others and the self we know, the self we want to be and the self we actually are, never line up exactly. Passing through this work, ‘Naesoong’ changed from a word for the two-faced attitudes of others into a state in which many selves coexist within one person. The Naesoong girl, too, moved from a figure satirizing others toward a self-portrait. In the end, coming to know yourself may be the process of accepting even your contradictory faces as parts of who you are.