Every once in a while, there are landscapes where I can relax my eyes and look at something, and the scene makes me lose track of where I am. Whether it's the vastness of the ocean, the myriad of fallen leaves, or a small square that has become a part of your hand. Within that space, countless information and stories were just the surface. One day, I tried to grasp the surface with my eyes, but the room became a vacuum, leaving me to fill in the gaps with my sighs. With the rest of my breath, I began to draw and repeat the picture as if reciting, and it began to become a panorama.

 

What was I trying to bring out in this continuous panoramic landscape? In fact, it is not trying to express anything, nor is it trying to create a linear narrative; it is just a superimposition of acts, a ruminating on a forgotten past, a struggle to shake off doubts about memory, and a worry about the distant future. The random arrangement of symbols and the succession of images they formed, became a meaningless chorus. I walked outside, aimlessly, until I came to a park with soggy leaves.

 

The rain-soaked leaves were no longer scattering fresh summer light; they had lost their original moisture and were now soaked with moisture from the sky. The unremarkable and poignant scene seemed to resemble the surface of all the images I had consumed and discarded. The images (movies, documentaries, theater, etc.) that proved to me that they actually wanted to exist, that they were part of a narrative cycle, were empty shells. I recognized the shells or surfaces as physical objects that existed, and washed over them, leaving behind only the clues of the stories I had encountered.

 

Kim Dongwoo graduated from Chung-buk National University's Department of Fine Art (2021). He unravels his fantasy life or landscape through painting. After collecting images mainly through daily life, movies, animations, and news, mutually disparate images are placed in one space and combined into fragmentary conversation images. He performs the task of filling the awkward gaps between separate images with imagination. At the same time, he asks how to deal with the flexibility hidden in the relationship between image and narrative in this situation. Major group exhibitions include Tomorrow's Artists (Cheongju Museum of Art, Cheongju, 2022) and Unstable Possibilities (Shema Museum of Art, Cheongju, 2021).​