(De-)vision Division

The series (De-)vision Division is a painting project in which I repeatedly rework a single composite scene that merges everyday life in North Korea with another everyday scene from South Korea. It began with a digitally assembled image made from two photographs: people playing volleyball in North Korea and hikers walking in the mountains of Gangwon Province in South Korea. In reality, movement between the two regions is extremely restricted; yet on the level of photography and media, their daily scenes can be placed side by side with ease within a single image. I bring into the field of painting the gap concealed by this “too-easy junction”—inaccessibility, control, and the ways we come to accept boundaries as self-evident.

The work makes visible, through painterly structure, the perceptual mechanism by which our gaze “divides” a scene (division) and then “re-weaves” it (de-vision). A boundary, in other words, is not an event outside the picture, but something that occurs inside it—through decisions of composition, form, rhythm, density, and color. Color in particular functions as a key boundary device: it can stabilize a scene as a “natural landscape,” or, conversely, disrupt that order, revealing tension and asymmetry.

Rather than presenting the scene as a coherent and stable view, the central method of the series is to expose the process by which an image fragments and is sutured back together. I split the scene into panel-like segments, overlay clues from different times and places, and repeatedly erase and repaint, leaving traces of decisions across the surface. Structural devices—diagonal cuts, panelization, and grid formations—generate boundaries within the picture while simultaneously operating as methods of re-stitching. As a result, the viewer’s gaze cannot settle in a single point; attempts to read a complete, unified landscape continually slip. In this way, the work translates the gap between “what is visible” and “what remains unseen” into a visual experience. Repetition here is not the reproduction of the same scene, but the accumulation of different choices of suturing each time.

Through this series, I unsettle boundaries not only within the landscape but also within painting’s own techniques and modes of representation, and I propose a possibility for the two regions to coexist within a fragmented, transformed pictorial field. Echoing the former German Chancellor Willy Brandt’s words—“What belongs together grows together”—the project experiments, within visual imagination, with what forms the conditions of coexistence might take, and how easily they can fracture and be woven together again.

In Korean society, division is repeatedly invoked, yet it can remain difficult to articulate in a personal language. This boundary not only restricts physical space; it can also become an invisible barrier that produces norms of self-censorship and silence. My work is therefore an attempt to visualize a landscape that cuts across these norms of silence, inviting viewers into a complex reality that is often buried in quiet.