(De-)vision Division

(De-)vision Division is a series of paintings in which an everyday scene from North Korea and another everyday scene from South Korea are merged into a single image and painted over and over. Its starting point is a composite of two photographs: people playing volleyball in North Korea, and people walking in the mountains of Gangwon Province in South Korea. I chose scenes that resist reading as immediate symbols of division — scenes one could plausibly come across in the North as easily as in the South.

From this composite I went on to paint a space in which North and South coexist. That space exists nowhere but in the painting. For each work I set a goal to be reached, and from that goal I determine the process of painting and the principles that govern the choices made along the way. When the goals and principles change, the paintings change with them, immediately.

The work exposes, through the structure of painting itself, a mechanism of perception: how our gaze divides a scene (division) and how it weaves it back together (de-vision). The border, then, is not an event outside the picture but something that occurs within it — as decisions about composition, form, rhythm, density and colour.

The central method of the series lies in refusing to present a scene as something stable, and instead exposing the process by which the image fragments and sutures itself. I break the scene into panel-like sections, overlay clues from different times and places, erase and paint over, and leave “traces of decision” across the surface. Structural devices such as diagonal cuts, panelling and grid structures work by generating borders within the picture and, at the same time, suturing them again. In this process the viewer’s gaze never settles on a single point but keeps moving, and any attempt to read one complete landscape continually slips. In this way the work converts the gap between the visible and the invisible into visual experience. Repetition here is not the reproduction of an identical scene but the accumulation of a differently chosen suture each time. The images have shifted from photographic reference to reconstruction from memory, along a nonlinear path.

Through visual imagination, the series tests within the field of painting what forms the conditions of coexistence might take — and how easily those conditions come apart and are woven together again.

Division is invoked over and over in Korean society, and yet it remains an area difficult to speak of in one’s own, individual language. This border does not merely constrain physical space; it can also become an invisible wall that produces self-censorship and a norm of silence. My work is therefore an attempt to visualize a landscape that cuts across this norm of silence.