[Title] PEOPLE
[Artist] Suh Se Ok
[Date] 9/28/2007-01/06/2008
There is no such thing as great completion. Always a continuation of uncertainty and incompletion. There exists possibly no perfect life or perfect art. If there is such a thing, then I will have to put my brush down. And that will terminate our life, too. But no, that is not the case. We go on in the state of incompletion. So for that reason there is attraction and a wait of life. A wait, that aspires for today’s empty hands to capture all sorts of things tomorrow. Pondering over such thoughts, a smile is brought to the face. This is our life. No artist says that his or her painting completed. I cannot say that paintings are done by myself, alone. It is but mere sleep-talk if I were to say so. A new aesthetics? Well, I do not know. Is it not comparable to the activity that a squirrel involves itself in, doing its usual turns on its wheel, going round and round. Is it not the same jargon being continuously repeated? Let us look back to a thousand years before, or even two thousand years back. What difference will there be from now until two thousand years later? Perhaps a little eloquence and criticism added on here and there?
I would like to think in this way: the path of a painter begins when the painter is able to become detached from aesthetics, theories, art history and criticisms. Why? Those are their playgrounds. They are not for painters. Painters do not need to get involved with such people’s merrymaking. The life of a painter should be like reflecting on a mirror. A mirror does not hide but reveals and accepts everything as it is, without leaving anything behind. A painter must accept and contemplate on matters, space and time. Yet a painter must not be attached to these things but freed from all. Only then one is able to create one’s own world and universe.
Oh how people like to cause a commotion when they encounter a new life or art –crying out in excitement WOW! Dogs too bark only at new things, but remain nonchalant on familiarities. The degree of closeness to the essence of things is determined by whether it fades or not over time. It is important that we continue walking our paths knowing this. Things that have faded in the long course of time come to have no meanings.
Words of Suh Se Ok, sited by the Conversation between Suh Se Ok and Kim Byung Jong, professor of oriental painting, Seoul National University.
This conversation is printed in “Suh Se Ok”, a publication that accompanied the exhibition Suh Se Ok (The Artist of the Year) at the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Deoksugung Branch, Seoul, Korea (2005)