In the winter of 1972, I applied to Seoul Arts High School with virtually no preparation. I had never done plaster drawing, so I filled the center of a large sheet with a fist-sized plaster cast, rendered almost entirely in black. Among the polished drawings around me, mine looked conspicuously awkward; failure seemed certain.Yet the result was unexpected: I was admitted as the top entrant.

 

I could not understand it, but that was how I stepped into the school. Later I tried to find out who evaluated the work, but I never could. The event remained as a question.​In my first drawing class, I was branded a “make-up student,” and from that day on I refused the regular drawing sessions. Instead, I held onto a single plaster cast and drew it again and again. One day I realized that the outline changed every time I looked. The experience—seeing something different in what was supposedly the same—was both a defeat and a starting point.​

 

Rather than training technique, I began to recognize the gap between the object and the act of looking. In college, a lecture on Marcel Duchamp and an essay on Paul Cézanne led me back to the same problem, articulated in another language. That question never went away. To “see” was never simple.