Magazine ART | 2013.12 (Issue 104) | Asking the Way Through the Maze of the Inner Abyss
Borrowing the story of the 'Room' from Andrei Tarkovsky's film Stalker, this article examines the gap between self and others' gaze that Kim Hyun Jung has explored through her hanbok-clad self-portrait series 'Naesoong,' and the fear embedded within it. Kim compares the act of painting to 'looking in a mirror,' and says that true happiness lies in discovering and accepting what one truly wants. The article closes with a brief biography of Kim Hyun Jung, a graduate of Sunhwa Arts School and Seoul National University's Department of Oriental Painting, who has held solo exhibitions and taken part in numerous group shows.
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There was a forbidden zone called the 'Room' that granted one's truest wish. The path to it was tangled like a maze, riddled with traps, but the moment one stepped inside, even a wish one hadn't known was in one's own heart would come true. One day, to save his beloved younger brother from an incurable disease, an older brother sets out to challenge the Room, and after surviving all manner of trials, finally reaches it. But his brother dies anyway, and the older brother becomes enormously wealthy. Afterward, he takes his own life.
This story is drawn from the film Stalker by Soviet-Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky (April 4, 1932 – December 29, 1986).
How many people truly know, with precision, what they themselves want? Countless works of literature, philosophy, and art endlessly pose the question of what the 'self' really is.
Discovering one's true self, one's true wishes and desires, may be just as much a 'maze of the abyss' as reaching that 'Room.'
What one finds at the end of this maze of the abyss might be something repulsive, as with the character in Stalker, or it might, as in a fairy tale, turn out to be unexpectedly beautiful. But one thing is certain: for a human being, finding what one truly wants, finding one's true self, is no easy task. Is it out of fear? Perhaps the maze of the abyss is a defense line the self has built for itself.
In Kim Hyun Jung's work — self-portraits in elegant hanbok under the theme 'Naesoong,' depicting the mismatch between outside and inside, and the modern person so conscious of others' gaze — the starting point was 'relationships with people, and their gaze.'
Watching others whose outside and inside diverged, what she felt was 'fear.' Because of that fear, her own feelings and sense of agency gradually grew hazy, and other people's gaze became her own yardstick.
That gaze, turned into a yardstick, in turn led back to a question about the 'self': 'What does my real self look like?' Kim Hyun Jung has said she didn't set out to tell her own story in her work, but eventually came to discover — and to accept — that her work does, in fact, express her own image, and the gap that arises between the self and others' gaze.
When their minds feel cluttered, people often say 'the world is in chaos.' A person troubled in this way visits a counselor, hoping to resolve their worries through them. In the course of counseling, they believe they're talking things through with the counselor (or heeding the counselor's advice), but in truth the counselor is merely drawing the story out of them. In the end, that troubled person finds comfort and healing simply by speaking their own inner truth. Because every problem, in the end, originates from oneself. It's not that the world is chaotic — it's that 'because my own mind is cluttered, the world merely looks chaotic.'
Kim Hyun Jung says that 'painting a picture is like looking in a mirror.' And she unpacks that idea with wit. Her own abyss is tangled like a maze, and fear follows. That wit is, perhaps, Kim Hyun Jung's own way of overcoming fear within herself, and the mirror is a guide that keeps her from losing her way in the maze. And so, she works.
'I think I'm happiest when I'm painting.'
Isn't discovering one's true self, what one truly longs for, and accepting oneself — isn't that true happiness?
_ Reporter Park Il-gyu
Kim Hyun Jung graduated from Sunhwa Arts School's Fine Arts Division, majoring in Oriental Painting, and from Seoul National University's College of Fine Arts, Department of Oriental Painting, and is currently in the master's program at the same graduate school.
She has held three solo exhibitions and taken part in numerous group and curated exhibitions in New York, Hong Kong, Busan, and Seoul.
She has won awards at the Korea Women's Art Grand Exhibition and the World Masterpiece Art Grand Exhibition, among others, and currently teaches at Anyang Arts High School.
Her works are held in the collections of Seoul National University Hospital, KEB Hana Bank, Shinhan Bank, and Deloitte Anjin Accounting Corporation, among others.