Painting, the Transversal of Event and Being

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 Kim Noam

 

Painting is a medium that traverses, in a single bound, from the most abstract and pure space of the mind to the roughest and heaviest material world of pigment. The painterly image and the frame that isolates it from everyday time and space execute a dual, paradoxical movement. On one hand, it renews our sense of the familiar world by rendering it strange, drawing us into the depths of unfamiliar thought. On the other hand, it intensely refreshes the vitality of the most primal and tactile reality that had been forgotten.

A painter’s gaze is neither static nor neutral like the lens of a mechanical camera. It constantly oscillates and breathes, responding violently to the turbulent real world. Within the unique stage of the canvas, the closed symbolic space of art collides and reconciles with the artist's pragmatic self which endures daily life beyond its boundaries, thereby sculpting a new ontological dimension.

 

Just as Giorgio de Chirico, in the early 20th century, through his extraordinarily keen gaze, arranged everyday objects within unfamiliar, non-linear spaces to trigger a metaphysical tension of anxiety and transcendence, true painting reveals sharp fissures of thought even beneath the sense of a dry and mundane reality. Borrowing the expression of philosopher Alain Badiou, painting is an "event of practice" that decisively fractures the existing visual order and conventional wisdom, giving birth to a new dimension of truth, previously non-existent, on the flat surface of the canvas. In every era, painters draw up ideas and senses, concepts and images into a single living body using a language filtered through their own physical bodies and breath. And the three artists highlighted by the 2026 Chongkundangkochon Yesuljisang, Park Nohwan, Park Wunggyu, and Jang Pa, relentlessly design and construct this painterly event on the canvas through their unique formal languages.