Kim Hyun Jung x Coy Playground x Sehando

Even a place touched by loneliness changes its landscape when someone comes to visit. The same place can hold an entirely different memory as time passes. Sehando (Winter Landscape), painted by the great scholar-calligrapher Kim Jeong-hui in 1844 during his exile on Jeju Island, was a gift of gratitude to his disciple Yi Sang-jeok, who remained loyally by his side through hardship. As the saying goes, ‘it is only in deep winter that we know the pine and cypress are the last to wither’ — the painting holds the truth that bonds of the heart grow clearest through solitary times. The artist invited the Naesoong girls into that lonely landscape. Just as Jeju — once a place of exile — has become today a destination people visit to rest, the arrival of the Naesoong girls shifts the lonely scenery of Sehando into a different kind of time. This work was presented in 2014 at an international academic conference on Kim Jeong-hui and Sehando, as a contemporary example of his aesthetic sensibility renewed. Perhaps art is, in the end, the act of adding new people and new stories to an old loneliness — bringing its landscape back to life.