Jeongkyu's world of art, as the title of her painting indicate, her painting is full of memories and nostalgia for the time lost. The world of her idiosyncratic painting is formed through her free interpretation or combination of figures and images, and free and bustling colors.

Her painting has so far remained in a figurative world until one year ago. Then she gradually approaches the cold reality an intentionally discards lyricism, and especially in her recent works she tries to draw objects in an indicative mood and the objects are those of everyday life.

By indicative mood is meant that she grasps the objects, mainly human figures, directly and simply. There is no room for ambiguity and rhetoric. In other words, the figures appearing in her painting rule over the canvas by themselves and are in complete possession of a message to be conveyed, and the message is the "human conditions"

The human conditions the artist depicts are far from being dramatic or go to any extremes. They are rather very ordinary and prosaic human life. And she depicts them without any embellishment like drawing a documentary picture.

Even though I said a documentary picture, it is devoid of any circumstances. Even if she deals with ordinary subjects, her method of depiction is neither descriptive nor representational. Narrative themes are as much compressed as is possible. Thus a scene of living or a fragment of reality is miniature of independent living or a portrait of an independent reality. And this seems to be the result of her changed angle of vision with which to observe reality.

We may call her changed angle of vision a kind of "objectification" in which the objects maintain a certain distance from the painter. A figure seems to be reduced to a prototype under the given circumstances. This prototype figure, the anonymous figure, seems to raise a basic question against the human existence on the one hand and on the other to be a "genre painting of contemporary men."

She transplants equally in a cool manner on her canvas this cool-headed and objectified angle of vision. She denies all the pompous pictorial effect and reduces all the objects into their own essential elements. The artist seems to try through these elements to tear away all the false images of life.

December 1990

Il Lee, Professor at Hongik University