pigment & oriental ink with water, 163.7 x 79.1cm, 2011

During more than forty years of my life as an artist, there were two decisive turning points. One was the year I spent at P.S.1.

The other came from the drawing of a first-grade child.

At the time, I was developing interdisciplinary educational programs using art and was working with first-grade elementary students and kindergarten children. One of the classes involved listening to the first movement of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No.14 (Moonlight Sonata) and translating the sensation of the music into drawing.

The children were asked to “play the paper” with their fingers, as if their fingers were performing the music.

While looking at the drawings produced during the class, I suddenly encountered an image that shook everything I had been studying and thinking about. It was the drawing of a first-grade child.

The image carried a kind of primal sensibility that had never been trained or instructed. In that moment I felt a quiet but powerful realization: perhaps this is where art must begin.

What struck me even more was that both the classroom teacher and the instructor who conducted the program also felt the beauty of the drawing. That shared response made the experience even more significant.

After that day, everything began to change.

After a long period of internal struggle, I decided to attempt a homage to that child’s drawing. Listening to the Moonlight Sonata, I placed my fingers on the paper as if they were playing a piano.

That was the beginning of this drawing.

Yet I could not immediately return to my own work. The educational programs supported dozens of people and involved hundreds of children, schools, and institutions. I could not simply abandon them. Time passed in a state of tension.

Several years later, the organization closed under difficult circumstances. Strangely, along with regret I also felt a sense of release. The possibility of returning to my work was suddenly open.

I cleared a small corner of a storage room filled with company equipment and began drawing again.

From that moment, a completely different trajectory opened before me.

I no longer felt the need to struggle against the historicist framework of contemporary art. Instead, it seemed that this history itself was something we all had to move beyond.

To open another path, I moved to Ganghwa Island and built a house and studio. There, over several years, I produced more than one thousand drawings.

Little Artists’ Finger Piano and Seasonal Trees, 2010