Where is Zen
My childhood in nature made a powerful imprint in my mind. Walking in the mountains and playing in the river left a memory of texture in a relationship with my environment. I grew up in a rural area in South Korea, where all my childhood memories were made with Mother Nature. For that obvious reason, all of my work is influenced by the natural environment where I grew up. This imprint of natural surroundings is expressed with the texture of the handmade paper surface, and the visual texture of printed lines and brushstrokes.
The curves of mountains and rivers form a beautiful proportion these images are my history revealed as a natural expression in my work. That is the reason why I prefer curve lines rather than the ¡°cold¡± straight lines. My use of line is in the arena of "stream of consciousness", in the way that it is free and unrestricted. The way I use line is the visual equivalent of my interior monologue, fragmentary thoughts and feelings. It is an expression of who I am.
The use of earth colors are also connected to the imprint in my mind of my early experiences living in nature. Soil was my only childhood toy. My friends and I could play with the mud for hours. In other words, mountains, mud, rocks, trees and all the plants and animals in nature are where the roughness of my work is rooted. It is not too much to say all my work is about nature and its breathtaking beauty.
My understanding of my artworks is of momentary traces of my abstract sensibility. So, my images are simple, direct, and layered into one another. In this way, my images are an expression of how I understand Zen. That is, my images get the feeling of Zen before they get a form of Zen.
Zen is free, effortless, and is a natural state of being that exists in all of us. Zen guides us to realize our true reality and identity and frees us from habitual thinking. But Zen practice, on the other hand, is very difficult, like life as we know it. The usual state to which we are accustomed is fraught with difficulty, for we don't know our Zen-nature, though it is all the while there with us. We become confused and don't know who or why we are or what to do. So, too, in Zen painting, the struggle is to maintain purity, and not let the ego take over with excess thinking, planning, judgment, and confusion. As children we paint, naturally, effortlessly as we see fit. Later we are taught to look this way and do it that way, and we are led to judgment and confusion. Zen painting runs counter to the usual academic and conceptual methods for creating artwork. I don¡¯t work in an academic way. My work is to remain open to the stream of consciousness and to my innate self, and express a larger awareness in a way that relates to universal conditions.
