The apparition of the lines oscillates, firmly yet fluidly, as if concealing an emotional breeze behind its immensely hardboiled exterior. I imagine the breeze that makes its way firm enough not to falter and yet flexible enough not to freeze. The sturdy yet serene lines and the seemingly nonchalant yet meticulous moments of drawing accumulate on the picture screen. As if delicately brushing a faint mist with a fine brush, evoking the colors of light-soaked air.

The painting, worked on in a horizontal plane while bending down on the floor, constantly contemplates the vertical wall to which it is destined to ascend. This is a conscious shift of the gaze, concentrated within the inner world, towards the external world. The painting’s body uniquely and intimately interacts with the body that observes it. I closely examine the colors of emotions densely imbued in the lines in the strenuous journey of painting – the warmth of the colored pencil residue left in the places where the linear and direct gestures passed, the tenacious time embodied in a hand-drawn painting. I suddenly tune into the reverberations in the world of resiliently billowing lines. The mind sometimes sways; it sometimes subsides.

Excerpt from “Hardboiled Breeze: Firmly Yet Fluidly”

Miran Park | Curator


It seems that Ji’s semblance has become more corporeal or affective than visual or optical in this exhibition. [...] In this work, we feel our bodies being directly affected by the wave field of the painting and simultaneously sense the resonance emerging. [...] The semblance here is thus a corporeal semblance. It is a semblance that one engages with and experiences through the body, not just with the limited eye. As if we would plunge into the sea, or, conversely, as if the sea would engulf us, we can allow our bodies to submerge into the undulations of the painting. It is in this moment of resonance with the waves that the boundary between the painting and myself vanishes, an in-between is created, and affect is activated. Because Ji’s work can never be detached from the performativity of repetition, he is always present in his work. The rhythm of the repetition emerges from the kinetic range of his eyes and body, from the artist’s own psychological and corporeal rhythm. Ji is not satisfied with embodying his own rhythm in the painting, but goes so far as to draw the viewer into this holistic world. His work begins with his corporeal performance and is completed by the viewer’s resonance with the work.

Excerpt from “From Visual Illusion to Corporeal Semblance”
Kyung Jin Jo | Research Professor at the Institute of Humanities, Yonsei University