Jiyoun Jeon

Jeon-Jiyoun’s Dancing Colors, Moving Color-Fields

   by Young Taek Park (art critic, Professor at Kyonggi University)

Is Jeon’s painting abstract? Abstract art signifies the absence of concrete imagery in the canvas which reminds of the external world. If so, is abstract painting something you don’t know even if you look at it, or something that doesn’t reveal it? However, abstract painting too appeals to our eyes absolutely. It’s a painting that relies on the retina more than anything else. Visualization of the invisibleㅡit offers us something unnamable: something without a name, something which has not been captured in the fishing-net of language or under man’s system of concepts. It may be a search for something possible within a primordial painterly act or the painting’s ontological conditions; it may be a desire to refuse to be captivated by an existing object and to speak through something non-objective.

The history of abstract art covers over a century; that is, when you take Kandinsky’s first abstract work as its origin. Through the history of modernism, the painting reaffirmed the condition of the picture as a plane, confirmed dyes, brushwork, and physical properties which make a picture what it is, and thereby opened the picture’s way in freedom from the object; thereby it evolved its own history. In the end, it reached a situation where the picture was lost in the canvas or where the picture itself was eliminated. Recent times have seen the diverse branches of the abstract astir again. How has abstraction moved in the wake of postmodernism? In actual fact, a picture can be concrete and abstract at the same time; and the border or difference between concrete and abstract may have no significant meaning. Painting itself is a thing and concept, being a concrete existence and a virtual reality at the same time.

Jeon has opted for the soft and resplendent hue of pastel tone. And she has painted a flat and even thickness; it looks proper, straight, firm and smooth. It gives an impression of filling an exact and consistent area. While restraining a free-wheeling brushwork or gesture, she has done plastic surgery to the dye and enhanced it. Accordingly, the dye has become a flesh and body; it comes as a dye but at the same time as some other material that has been made by replacing the surface of the canvas with the dye. Here color is a representation of the artist’s disposition and a color preferred by the artist herself; it’d also be color chosen from the point of view of composing the canvas as a whole. It’d also be color as a substitute of her ego and subjectivity, and a color chosen from the standpoint of conveying some kind of message. Color in itself suffices to be a core element of a picture as with a painting based on the relationships between colors. And they take place like the pieces on the go-board. As a piece is placed, another piece is laid down inevitably due to the previous piece; in like manner another color intervenes spontaneously and next to the first color. One color calls for another color, not just because of the artist’s summons, but by the call from among the colors placed on the canvas. In this manner, a color calls to diverse colors in a chain action without ever shouting or yelling. By the same token, it not only calls for specific colors but determines the size of the color as well. The hue thus drifts about and the color-field moves around. Within the plane, color, color-field and lines created by color-field move around dynamically as if dancing, thus creating a bright canvas overflowing with life force and animated atmosphere. One thus experiences extraordinary decorativeness and cheerfulness in the canvas overflowing with some sort of sensuous power.

The artist cuts open the lump of the color-field resolutely and sensitively. To begin with, the canvas gets divided into several colors. Not one particular shape occupies the canvas but the color takes possession of the canvas. The plane of a single color completes a certain part and begins the narrative. Thus, the picture approaches a great bulk of color. And then it again disperses and scatters as several balls of color. First of all, differences of color make the picture and the borders between different colors give birth to colors. Sometimes the lines give the plane some height, producing a protuberance emerges, or they dig into the surface as an intaglio. The line divides the color, spontaneously creates borders, and that borderline pursues the traces of geometric and organic line. Here the line is a wound inflicted inevitably by the difference between color-fields and the border between surfaces. And it’s a shape that determines the configuration of the specific color-field. At the same time, it operates an element that gives the color-field some sense of shape. That sense of shape uplifts every piece of color and color-field as largely symbolic entities. That creates the traces of a concrete painting within an abstract painting, or the atmosphere of a landscape. The application of the dye also brings along some thickness and a sense of texture as it gets overlaid, making the canvas rather flat and tactile. It also serves as an element that makes the canvas greatly expressive, which can be somewhat monotonous otherwise.

Jeon’s pictures comprise color, dye, brushwork, color-field and icon and are filled with the arrangements and multiplications of relationships among them. Instead of reminding of the outside world or indicating something, the ontological conditions constituting the picture and the circumstantiality shown by matters that make the picture possible are perceived. Several contrasting elements such as expansion and contraction among colors, extension and accumulation, contrast and conflict between color-fields and lines that go on in the space sensitively contend one with another. Though concrete shapes are absent, potential morphemes exist as ever. Almond-shaped forms frequently emerge. They remind of a ship, ark, fortress, castle, house, mind’s crystals, jewel, hard and safe shields. Over the vast canvas these shapes appear and disappear continually. Perhaps it’s a symbol which offers the artist much comfort, or an entity that represents the artist’s own sense of being. The icons that hover over the neat and clear color, and the somewhat strict color-field as the artist’s own codeㅡthey are decisive entities that make up Jeon’s own special imagery and epic abstraction toward a symbolic abstract painting. The artist, recruiting these forms which contain the symbols intending to convey her own mind and intimate meaning, intimately draws the abstract painting that harbors epic impulses.

It’s my estimation that Jeon’s pictures constitute attempts to sustain the painting (abstract) while they can’t return to the concrete in a simple manner and yet don’t repeat the yoke of formal abstraction. At the same time, they pursue the possibility of pictures that are beautiful, charming, decorative and lively if only with colors and lines as ever. In concluding, I venture to say that the artist attempts to achieve symbolic and landscape-like abstraction and language-like abstraction by creating diverse distinctions while maintaining color-field abstraction externally. It appears that she is developing her own stories by repeating several symbolic patternsㅡThis, of course, within the structure of the abstract painting.