Inwang Without the Mountain

 

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Erasing the Figure of Inwang from Clearing After Rain on Inwang

There was never an easy path for me.

In 2019, I cleared a corner of a small storage building on Ganghwa Island and began what I called “finger drawings.” What followed was a long sequence of discarded works. Yet those failures did not teach me how to draw. What they taught me was how to perceive the body.

The finger was the moment when the body opened a field of sensation, and drawing became the events through which that sensation unfolded in action and time.

“It was not drawing with the finger. 

It was the body opening sensation.”

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While working on this archive recently, that realization returned to me with greater clarity.

My sensory awareness had first operated through objects—points of contact between myself and the world. It then moved into the body through video, and through drawing it has now entered even deeper, reaching the dimension of sensation, action, and time.

This is not merely a shift in technique or form.

It is a methodology entirely different from the painting I once knew.

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For this reason, there is no object to be drawn in my drawings. I neither depict nor represent anything, nor do I feel the need to explain.

In a certain sense, they are like Inwang Jeseok with the figure of Inwang Mountain removed.

What remains is simply a state in which perception opens.

What matters is not the image, but the event that occurs when sensation, action, and material meet.

For me, materials are not tools. They are entities with their own voices and their own force of expression. Rather than dominating or using them, I try to respect and receive their qualities.

Paper and canvas, charcoal and pigment—each has its own structure and character. My role is simply to intervene as little as possible and to adjust the relationship so that each may reveal itself.

The moment when immersed sensation and action meet material is the event, and what remains on the surface is a trace.

These are transparent records in which time and action unfold in a non-linear way.

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I often think of Paul Cézanne and Gyeomjae Jeong Seon.

Cézanne observed and analyzed Mont Sainte-Victoire for many years. His paintings emerged from that prolonged visual study.

Gyeomjae, by contrast, did not merely observe. Even in his seventies he climbed Inwang Mountain again and again in order to confront it with his body.

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This difference matters to me.

My drawings do not begin by analyzing what is visible, nor by expressing something in order to make it visible. 

They begin at the moment when the body opens sensation and perception begins.

In that sense, my drawings become the site where perception passes through the body and meets material—an event.

To reach this absolute immersion, I awaken my senses in the pure silence of early dawn.

Body and sensation, material and time—they are not separate from one another.