From Afar, but also from the Nearest
April 3-May 4, 2023

A club-sized bone is tossed up into the air. The blue sky surrounding the bone turns into the near-black indigo of space, and the bone soaring high switches into an elongated spacecraft. In the previous scene, one primate leader uses the bone to club the leader of a competing group to death. And while the bone is the very first apparatus of violence in the history of mankind, the spacecraft that follows is, in fact, a nuclear-armed satellite system. This is the opening of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). An allegoric sequence that condenses the ageless tale of humanity — the violent nature intrinsic to humankind from the very dawn of the species and how technology developed over tens of thousands of years toward the end — this scene remains one of the most famous openings in the history of film.
Every person lives a person’s life, but the task of sifting one person’s story from the immense narratives of society and history always proves challenging. And although we are individuals, we must ride on the backs of gigantic storylines, such as social change and the flow of history, and we travel without ever knowing where they might bring us. We cannot know if our small actions and everyday struggles would ever matter in such massive narratives; all we could do is live the today. But, despite all this, every individual is unique and invaluable on their own. The bright radiance of life and its organic, vivacious energy lies not in the immense flows of history but within the everyday lives of individual men.

Forms That Arrive on Their Own
Semi-abstract forms repeatedly feature in Lee Junwon’s paintings. Examined more closely, they seem to be various body parts like hands, feet, eyes, organs, and muscles, intermingled and moving in an organic manner. However, although we call them body parts, we know that each one of these is a vigorous living being who is fighting fierce battles, working tirelessly, and passionately making love at every moment of their life. The plot is a common one that can apply to anyone, but we also know that the actual scenes produced by such a plot are unique instances and, moreover, that they are interpreted differently by every individual. Where could these energetic beings have come from?
Lee says that it would be more precise to say that he “summons” them rather than creates them. Beyond telling the tales of individual human beings, Lee, instead, channels the numberless stories inscribed into the species of mankind over history and glides them onto his canvases as marks. Lee paints without making any preliminary drawings or sketches. While this improvisational working process may remind us of abstract expressionism, Lee’s practice is distinct from the school in that he does not depend upon the physical randomness generated at the moment when the brush and canvas make contact.
To observe his inner encounters with the energy of life as accurately as possible and bring them out as faithfully as possible, Lee constantly sharpens his practice. As someone dealing with beings that were already born and living eons ago, he transfers them onto his canvases with utmost care so that their energy would not be scattered and preserved fully intact. The sagas with no beginning and the beings bearing immeasurable energy work their way through Lee’s hands and arrive on their own. They arrive without following a set order, but they naturally find the right place they should be and eventually reveal themselves in a whole, united scene. In the case of Lee’s unique studio practice, every step of him making his works is no less an art than the finished paintings.

The Original of Our Stories
Those who work in narrative art forms such as novels or plays say that after a certain point in writing a story, the protagonists come to life, gain consciousness, and start making stories on their own. Because the characters develop levels of personality as rich and profound as those of a real person, they do not always obey the author’s commands despite them essentially being inhabitants within the author’s work of fiction. Lee’s forms have the same principles. They bear immeasurably long narratives tracing back to the very first days of Homo sapiens, the dynamic energy of human beings who withstand and compete against the struggles of everyday life, and the dreams and expectations people bear in their futures. And they channel through Lee’s hands and reveal themselves on his canvases, autonomously creating stories just as the protagonists in a work of fiction do.
The ubiquitous and abstract narratives contained in Lee’s works do not pertain to any specific person, but by the same token, the stories could apply to any viewer observing his paintings. The narrative in Lee’s oeuvre is the original of many such stories, penetrating through time as long as myths. Works of myths — and especially their stock of countless symbolisms — may seem to us legends infinitely distant and irrelevant to our everyday lives, but the love and suspicion, failure and growth, unyielding perseverance, and their narratives of fighting to destruction, overcoming peril and making a comeback are not very different from the lives we live now or the modern works of fiction we delight in. Take a few steps away, and you see that all of the stories made by men share more or less the same structure and that history has been repeating itself in the same way. We are all living through myths — or plots that repeat for eternity.
However, the tale every individual lives is unique and never the same as any other. History repeats the same stories endlessly, but ultimately, it is the relatively small movements of human beings that add variations to the plot and make the narrative more intriguing. In the 2017 film Dunkirk, there appear civilian fishermen who give up their profits and sail their boats to save lives, a young soldier who overcomes his fears and sacrifices himself, and citizens who welcome soldiers returning home defeated with warm applause. Saving Private Ryan (1998) tells the story of a purely humane military operation amid war’s ruthlessness to rescue the last surviving son of the Ryan family following the death of all of his other brothers, during which the son refuses to withdraw for not wanting to abandon his comrades. But it wasn’t just during extreme circumstances such as wars; even in the most frivolous struggles a person might face, the human courage and will to challenge the old, overarching plot were always what led to the birth of new stories.

The Marks of Courage
We cannot escape from the big narratives we are part of, but it is also true that each one of us is the owner of his own life. On the other hand, we also know that obedience cannot always be the solution to the myriad challenges we face in life. To change our future even by the slightest bit or to make wishes that the bone our ancestor tossed into the air does not remain just a club and a weapon, our will to overcome our past must try directions not taken before. What does painting mean in this context? To answer this question, we may return to cave paintings, the first of mankind’s visual art, which likely began as “marks” of yearning and “totems” of encouragement — in other words, they were the fiercest of our gestures for survival.
The Korean philosopher Kim Chang-Rae wrote in his book Science and Human Sciences (2021) that, as we are living in an era where identical things repeat and return endlessly, we are always at the risk of being snapped into solitary confinement of the now, believing that the repeating reality is the only way to be. But historians and poets shake our shoulders, wake us up, and expand our souls to the past, future, and realms of imagination. We understand and reconcile our differences by expanding our cognition, and we break the notion that there is only one answer to life and form new egos. Kim says that only by attaining such a viewpoint that tolerates diversity and simultaneously accepts the commonality of life could we genuinely break the shackles of the now.
Now, let’s replace historians and poets with “artists.” Lee’s works contain ubiquity and individuality at the same time. They remind us of the stories that repeat timelessly, but they also awaken and encourage us to overcome sameness. And it is this courage that breaks us away from the tireless, cyclical stories and spurs us to push forward with our individual narratives. Our movements are too weak to overturn the grand narratives and orders, but these are what brought us thus far. And therefore, the beings Lee summons in front of us and the marks they leave on his canvases must be the products of courage to bring change even by the slightest.
The sound of drums that began beating from unfathomable past cuts across time and rings in our ears. The great river that transcends spacetime flows ferociously. We are no more than minuscule beings riding on the shoulders of an eternal giant, and his footsteps rock the earth. We know how difficult it is to swim against these currents, but we would always try again just one more time. Everyone who battles against the tasks of his life is decorous, and this is a truth that had never changed from the epochs when all stories began and a truth that lies the nearest to us.

Kim Jiyeon (Art Critic) bloom_ing@naver.com