Again, for Elegy I 다시, 엘레지를 위하여

Jaeyeon Cho
Art Critic, Senior Editor at Art in Culture

It can be stated, without hesitation, that Hayoung Eum’s painting begins by passing reality through an X-ray. Seen in this way, reality becomes a site where narratives once clinging like skin and meanings that ought to have flowed like blood are stripped away, leaving only the bare bones of signs and geometry. It is a world so desiccated that it approaches a vacuum. “There is nothing but the fact that it was painted.” Before this confession, how are we to read these works? They may be understood, in a broad sense, as elegies. Not because they narrate loss, but because they emerge from the recognition that life is neither a narrative neatly organized by cause and effect, nor a place where meaning is granted at the end like a reward. Yet this elegiac tone does not resolve into resignation. What it conceals, rather, is an ongoing tension—a struggle between Hayoung Eum and life itself. As suggested in the artist’s note, there is a paradox at work: as memory fades, and as the language to articulate it disappears, sensation becomes all the more pure, more precise, more true. This paradox defines his attitude toward life. Stories, in the end, are fragile. Values, too. But their absence does not render life fragile. One need not produce countless episodes or lessons, as if to justify a life. Even without them, life remains—sufficiently, quietly—pretty.