On Relations

Letter

A while ago, I started noticing that the conclusions I was reaching in my work tended to resonate with the rest of the world as often as they outrightly conflicted with it. Because I feel a certain responsibility to communicate my thoughts and my discoveries, it became necessary for me to reconsider my relationships with art foundations, art schools, artist colleagues, art historians, art museums, art galleries, art collectors, art journalists, laypeople, my family, past and future generations of artists.

I consider myself a painter. As such, I feel a kinship with past generations of painters – my relationship with them is at the core of my work. I study their work in hopes of making a small but significant contribution for future generations of painters. What better place to study artists of the past than in art museums? I remember visiting Thorvaldsens Museum in Copenhagen as a five year-old. I wish I could say that I marvelled at the contours of Thorvaldsen’s sculptures, but I only recall being contrary and fed up after a day of touring the city. I do vividly remember the smooth, cool stone floor on which I eventually threw myself facedown, and my uncle Sun (who was visiting from Korea) dragging me around on it, and the way my cheek was cold to the touch afterward. As an artist, I am aware of the importance of my work being included in museum collections (and not only because they are open to the public for any tired kid to come in and commence their cultivation by being dragged over their cool and smooth floors) but because I believe that art museums take good care of their works, take them seriously and present them well to their audience.

Of course, museums are more than deluxe storage units; the works in museum collections must have relevance for the general public and offer vital information about our cultural development. But needless to say, museums are far from perfect. They can manufacture or distort history; they can be competitive businesses, changing the natural course of contemporary artists’ development; they can bow to politics; they can make corrupt deals and they aren’t even foolproof storage units: their security can fail, jeopardizing extremely valuable work. I like being in museums, the sheer mass of artwork that they can house and that they give me the opportunity to see works I know only from books or maybe even not at all. I know a few museum directors, but I can’t say that this affects or enhances my relationship to museums in any way. It’s the works that speak.

And then there’s my gallery. For most intents and purposes, galleries are businesses. Running a gallery is a lot of work and an extremely costly affair to boot. And when a young artist becomes involved with a commercial gallery, s/he must be discerning as well as realistic. On some level, the relationship between an artist and a gallery will always be reflected in the artist's work, and in my experience the best relationships only impact the way you work, not your material or immaterial artistic goals. Today I am lucky to have a fruitful relationship with my gallerist and I value the fact that she sincerely cares about me and respects my art. She arranges exhibitions of my work and artists’ talks, introduces me to curators, critics, and other relevant personages in the art world. As far as I'm concerned, this is the optimum outcome of the alliance between art and commerce.

My relationship to members of the press has been a little rocky. An attempt I once made to have a journalist write for a catalogue ended in disaster for both the poor journalist and myself. Journalists, or news reporters, report the news, and art is very very old news. Journalists’ hearts beat quickly and their Five W’s don’t quite do justice to the spirit of art; what I needed was an art historian, a professor, an art critic or a curator, not a journalist. Not that things are less complicated with art historians, professors, art critics and curators, but my experiences with them have been more fruitful. Having your work translated from a visual language to the written language of words is odd. As an artist, you gain a new perspective, albeit a subjective one. There is no objective translation of artwork; there is always a built-in sentiment. I truly enjoy reading well-written texts about (or responses to) my work and feel honored to have inspired such eloquent reactions.

I steadfastly believe in my relationship with my colleagues. In particular, I’ve forged a kinship with artists I have met on the Internet. Some of my colleagues have afforded me a bridge to art students, reminding me of my own studies and allowing me to reflect on the development process of an artist, starting from the safety of the seedpod, to sprouting and eventually blossoming. I realize that art students need care, warmth, water and light to thrive and in a way, I would do almost anything to foster and promote their growth. But my firm belief in the Platonic tradition hinders me. Essentially, there is one answer to the question of how to navigate the jungle of relationships without sacrificing progress, integrity or authenticity: I am my own teacher and my own student and above all, I have a great deal of self-reflection to do. I have little or perhaps nothing at all to communicate, but I am willing to share my humble reflections so that others can reflect their own self-reflections on them.