Elegance and Stillness in the Midst of Noise

​Kenshu Li  | Art Critic

In Lingering Grace, the depicted scenes could be fleeting moments encountered in our daily reality or elusive episodes from dreams. Rather than inciting emotions or excitement through tumultuous or comical events and landscapes, the compositions utilize simple, modest forms and a palette of pastel tones that prefer neutrality, evoking a profound stillness and a sense of nostalgia. It feels as though one can hear the music of a circus or a slowly revolving carousel from childhood—perhaps it's just a personal illusion. The unexplainable figures in the paintings, while clad in the garb of reality, move and float in an air that is surreal. The lightness and brilliance envelop a silence and solitude, conjuring strange déjà vu and exotic nuances, along with a subtle voyeuristic element. These reveal a multilayered and profound canvas that, whether unreal or surreal, reflects and originates from a fantastical reverie distanced from reality. Hayoung Eum’s work transcends mere illustration. Instead of the directness and centrifugal effect typical of illustration, it encompasses a variety of concepts and ideas that surfaced through both conscious and unconscious experiences and imagination, layered and re-covered in new colors and shapes on the canvas. Like writing on a pad, where previous writings, though erased, remain as invisible traces beneath new writings, postmodern writing reveals the erased, preserving what was deleted in the process of creation. On this canvas, a writing pad of memory and thought, the coexistence of seemingly unrelated text and image, and the process of erasing to create a complete picture challenge the conventional dependency of text on image and vice versa. The phrases that appear—be they from spam emails, political declarations, or cartoon dialogues—are drawn, not written, liberating them from the traditional linguistic structure of signifier and signified. Each motif staged on the canvas gathers intermittently encountered images from daily life or various media, reassembling them into fragmented vignettes that share neither context nor causality. The storytelling inherent in the canvas is not a reproduction of specific spaces or events but a mise-en-scène of space without a subject. In this narrative of displaced images and symbols that are recontextualized and rearranged, a new narrative of painting emerges. The icons of flame-spewing boats or cars, or characters inscribed without context in corners of the painting, remind one of Magritte’s strategy of similitude, which challenged the principle of resemblance that dominated Western painting from the 15th to the 20th century. Magritte, along with Kandinsky and Klee, who ventured into abstraction to dismantle the classical principles of depiction, emphasized the visibility of the invisible, shifting away from figuration to abstraction, whereas Magritte depicted objects realistically but subverted the traditional principles of representation. Similarly, Hayoung Eum’s images, simulacra without originals, find their raison d'être not outside but within the canvas, thriving with their own vitality beyond mimicry or replication. According to Foucault, these simulacra "start from themselves, expand, and fold over themselves," constantly generating and interacting on the tableau, freely encoding and decoding their linguistic significance. The poetics felt in Hayoung Eum’s paintings stem from such dynamics. Previously a leading figure in fashion illustration, the artist left countless works in the glamorous world of fashion, where the term "glamorous" originally signifies a dazzling brilliance that seduces with desire. Few understand as well as this artist how images and text intersect within theories of desire to affect the viewer in the ecology of communication. Now, within the space of fine art painting, he engages wholeheartedly with purity, devoid of any cunning or force, eliciting from us a benevolent sentiment and warm imagination when we encounter truthful painting. His works, sincere and simple, carry the purifying power of childhood, leaving a deep and lasting impression. The artist describes the exhibition title Lingering Grace as “the irony of elegance embedded in absurd situations, the tranquility within splendor.” He understands that true elegance and stillness bloom from such paradoxical contradictions.