DIE WOLKEN KÖNNEN TÄUMEN

KUNST IN DER SYNAGOGE AM NEUEN PALAIS POTSDAM

Es ist das »Wesen der Dinge«, das ich suche, und ich liebe es, Geschichten zu erzählen und zu hören. Durch das Studium der traditionellen Kalligrafie in Südkorea und dann der zeitgenössischen westlichen Malerei an der Universität der Künste in Berlin beschäftigte ich mich schon früh mit dem Spannungsfeld interkultureller Diskrepanzen. Besonders faszinierte mich dabei, wie sich dieser Zustand über das Individuum in die gesellschaftliche Ebene hinein auswirkt. Dieses Spannungsfeld erweiterte sich in mei ner Kunst zunehmend um die Themen der Globalisierung, der Technologie, der Natur sowie des (Lebens-)Raums, der uns umgibt, wobei konsequent subjektive Erfahrungen und meine Lebensgeschichte einflossen. Der Zugang zu diesen Themen ist sowohl in den großen Malereien, den aufwendigen Skulpturen, aber auch in der von mir entwickelten Col-lage-Technik aus selbst produziertem Reispapier stets emotional geprägt.

Um für das Projekt in der Synagoge am Neuen Palais in Potsdam einen inhaltlichen Ausgangspunkt zu finden, entschied ich mich für die Symbole des »Wassers« und des »Baumes«, um das »Wesen der Dinge« her-auszuarbeiten: In der (jüdischen) Religion steht der Baum als Symbol für das Leben. Er spendet Schatten in der Hitze und Früchte zur Ernährung; er ist dabei fest verwurzelt im Hier und Jetzt. Das Wasser transzendiert das Leben und macht mit seiner ewigen Tiefe das Paradies für den Menschen greifbar. Zudem ist es die Quelle, aus der das Leben entsteht und aus dem der Baum seine Lebenskraft zieht.

Um diesen wichtigen inhaltlichen Gedanken vom »Kreislauf des Lebens« in den Prozess der Skulptur hineinzuarbeiten, suchte ich nach einem Ansatz von besonderer Art. Ich zeichnete das Wasser mit seinen organischen Verläufen und Formen auf Aluminium und schnitt die so entstandenen »Wasser-Formen« anschließend aus dem Aluminium her-aus. Mit diesen »Cut-Outs« wurde die aus abstrahierten Bäumen, Wolken und Wasser bestehende Skulptur gestaltet. Das Wesentliche an dem Konzept ist also, dass alle Objekte aus den Strukturen des Wassers

»herausgearbeitet« wurden und damit der »Kreislauf des Lebens« durch den »Kreislauf der Materialien« reflektiert wird.

Eine besondere Rolle bei der Installation und Skulptur kommt dem Licht zu. Es bestrahlt die Skulptur selbst und ist zugleich auch in die gesamte Gestaltung der Synagoge integriert. Je nachdem, aus welcher Entfernung und aus welchem Winkel die Skulptur betrachtet wird, erlebt man ein neues sinnliches Spiel von Licht und Schatten, und alles ist in ständiger Bewegung und Erneuerung. Die Wolken scheinen immer einen anderen Traum zu träumen. Gleichzeitig lässt die blaue Illumination des Tora-Schreines und im Sitzbereich Besucher und Zuschauer in endlosem Wasser gleiten – eine Transzendenz zum Geistigen wird geschaffen. Die Rezipienten sollen angeregt werden, in sich selbst zu gehen, zu reflektieren und spirituell zu erforschen – um so die Träume der Wolken zu erspüren.

In my new series of works, I would like to focus on the themes of “seeing and being”.
Culture, perspective, and personal belief determine what we see. What we see, however, does not necessarily correspond to what is really there.

Asian culture and philosophy is about holistic perception from a social we-perspective and always trying to penetrate the essence of things.

Western culture, on the other hand, springs from an ego perspective and the objective level of seeing. What is seen is interpreted as real.

An international study that explored the reception behaviors of Western and Asian culture inspired me to this series. In this study people from Western and Asian countries were shown the same image of a tiger in a cage.

The western people interpreted the image more on a matter-of-fact level, making statements such as “That’s a very big tiger in a zoo.”
Asians, on the other hand, expressed themselves more on a contextual level of interpretation, making statements like “The animal is caged and must be very sad,” a very different approach to the visible.

In the same way, Asian painting, through the two-dimensionality of most drawings and paintings, is designed to create a holistic approach for the viewer. The absence of perspective leaves the viewer free to decide contextually how he or she wants to see the painting.

Western painting works with perspective and vanishing points in a more three-dimensional space to direct the viewer’s gaze to specific points.

This dichotomy of perception fascinated me and inspired this new series of works: do I look to penetrate being and the essence of things – or do I see what is offered to me?

Living between the Western and Asian worlds has always informed my work, as has the question of how globalization and digitization have affected our perception of space, time, and the essence of things.

In the new series of works, I have deliberately chosen the familiar motif of flowers, which for me has no particular meaning in painting, but can create an aesthetic approach to the subject. I deliberately vary with the perspectives, painting techniques and spaces to invite the viewer to think about the context and the essence of things.

It may not sound obvious, but this series is not about flowers in the essence: it is about being and the essence of things. The viewer should experience a “background vision”, which I stimulate with striking foregrounding of the motifs to create a deliberately sensual approach.

Credits: Studio Seo

In Korean philosophy “Being with the mountain at your back looking at the river” means that you have found the best place for a perfect home. For me, the mountain at my back means that I have my roots there, and the water symbolizes the foreign and the curiosity about it.

In my artistic thinking I am surrounded and influenced by many experiences and the encounters I have. The two cultures, in which I live, play an important role. The Asian “philosophy of togetherness” and the “European philosophy of loneliness” sometimes tear apart my senses. These are two different speeds, which are difficult to tame. But I draw a lot of strength, energy and inspiration out of this for the art that squeezes out of me.

After studying traditional Caligraphy in Korea from 1996 to 2000, I wanted to develop artistically beyond the boundaries of my culture. So I moved to Germany to study and explore Western painting and to further develop myself as an artist. From 2001 to 2003 I studied at the UDK Berlin and was a master student of Georg Baselitz.

In European painting, I was particularly fascinated by early Romanticism, Romanticism and Neo-Romanticism. For example, Caspar David Friedrich’s pictorial inventions and aesthetics, but also Baselitz’s paintings fascinated me from the beginning and served as a starting point for my research.

Baselitz told me one day, “You must never forget where you come from.” This sentence triggered a process of both content and formal approach in my art and research.

So I increasingly started to explore cultural topics, as well as artistic ones. So I combined the line painting from Caligraphy with painting techniques and motifs from the West, and I found a way of creating my art through a special and unique technique of collaging rice paper.

In terms of content, I am interested in the different approaches to the same themes from Western and Eastern culture as well as philosophy, which together with the questions of the social coexistence of people, their environments, the increasing technologization and globalization form the Sujet of my work.

In the work series “Strange in your own home” I focus on the dimension of aesthetics and a neo-romantic emotional perspective. This refers to both the content and the symbolism as well as the painting approach of the works.

“Water” and “Sky” have always been elements that have accompanied my paintings, as they represent a fundamental basis for me to unite the charges of symbols and philosophies from different cultural perspectives within one painting. I can also produce different positions in the painterly elaboration of these elements. Similarly, I also play with spatial design and spatial perspectives, which are fundamentally different in Eastern and Western painting, but which I combine here.

The trees in this series of works together with the water and the sky complete the life worlds in which we move. Through the different painterly design and the means of reflection, inversion and the use of different perspectives, I create different emotions, effects and access for the viewer. Sky, water and earth express here simultaneously both the “finding” and the “search”.

The swans are for me a symbol of the individual and society. They are together, but at the same time equally lonely, have mystique and romanticism given to them. They move together, but also for themselves. Distance and closeness are here in a perpetual tension.

The emotions and feelings of people and social perception are constantly meandering and transforming – just as reality and our being are in a constant development and acceleration. I express this through the various painting techniques in this series of works.

At the center of all these considerations, however, is for me the emotional and aesthetic impact in this work series, which I would like to describe as radical-romantic or radical-neo-romantic. The exaggeration and vivid color choices of the otherwise very soothing, romantic pictorial motifs highlight the tension between “seeking” and “finding.” The mysticism, symbolism and familiarity of the motifs in turn force the viewer into the romantic-melancholic world of the work series. Seen in this way, a romantic assault on the viewer takes place here, who is supposed to feel strange in his own home.

“My themes have always been Society, Culture, People, Technologies, Nature and the World, which is surrounding us. Everything is changing through the Globalization, and so does the access of people to the world, their emotional inner life and the Me-to-We-relation from the individual to the society.

Landscapes like my early rice field paintings, which were based on a socio-cultural level and utilized both western and eastern painting techniques, gave way to motifs of people and gigantic nature and then more and more transcended into different positions towards space and our increasingly fast impacted surroundings by the globalization.

In „Seeing the world through circles” I am approaching this Sujet on the one hand with fantastic worlds and architectures, which are the emotional projections of my perception and globalization, on the other hand with a conceptual position, which is driven by abstraction and the use of colour and formal symbolism.

Both approaches first seem contrary and different from each other, but the themes are the same: Once seen through my heart and driven by gut feel (fantastic landscapes and architectures) – and then through my thoughts and my mind (abstractions of the same ideas through circles).

The one cannot be without the other.

The circles represent my diverse themes, which melt together in new colors and forms in the intersections to create a new modulation and composition. I have been working on this abstract circle concept for quite a while next to the fantastic landscapes, to express my themes by heart, gut feel and conscious thoughts in a complementary way.

With this series I want to trigger both sensual and intellectual impulses for the viewer and create a rational and emotional access to my work – exactly the way I feel and think myself into reality.
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“The Divine is of this world. One cannot only experience it in an abstract way, but also sensually – in the universe, in a paper shaving, in the expression of a dog. In Korea, enlightenment and epiphany originally were the same. I Germany the word reigns supreme. I am standing in between.”

“My canvases are mirrors. Things aren’t what they seem to be, neither is the self.”

“I don’t find reality, I invent it. I do not depict reality, rather I join it together from torn rice paper.”

“”To understand the visible, one has to look at the invisible. I am after an aesthetic of the invisible, I want to show the heart of things.””