Song Jiyeon

"My paintings began from finding my own self. Because I was aware of the incompleteness of the existence of the so-called ‘self’, I chose the external environment surrounding me as the object which could speak on behalf of myself. I am keeping my eyes on the surrounding environment that always change and develop, not fixed consistently. Having grown in the city, since childhood up to now, although it is a space that is friendly and comfortable more than any other landscape, I don’t look at the city in a positive nor negative way. To me, city is the way it is. It is because city is a place which coexisted with myself the moment I had existed. City enables me to possess the meaning of my existence. The process of progressing my work is the repetition of ‘painting and erasing’. Through the process of painting, erasing and then painting again, thin layers of paints are created and interlocking of colors are formed. During the process of which I began my earlier works, the method of dividing people’s views different from each other into layers, distinguishing them in colors, planes and lines, and then accumulating them into one drawing by using tracing papers became the motif, and it is ultimately being reflected into my works of today. The process of ‘painting and erasing’ expresses the texture of paint but it is also a method of introspection on my own self. Painting over by repeating the same painting is questioning on the meaning of existence to my own self and it is an act of reminiscing the meaning of life. In my work, I wanted to depict the resonance of the cityscape like how the tinkling sound of a wind-bell hanging at the end of some temple’s eave softly resonates in the wind. I expressed the image of a church where one can hear the bell ringing at dawn, the image of a city before sunrise, the image when the sun sets, the image of a hot sunny afternoon, the image of a day when cherry blossoms are blooming, the image of a foggy city, and etc. I wished to deliver the tranquil sound of landscape by clothing life to the city of solid cuboids."

-Artist statement