CARADAVERDA / 2025.01.16 / Luna Kim

“Caradaverda" is a pun combining the Japanese word Carada (体), meaning "body," and cadaver, the anatomical term for a corpse used in medical dissection. The kanji 体 (Carada) is derived from the character meaning “a body” and “to overflow” though this meaning is now almost obsolete. The word cadaver comes from the Latin cadere, meaning “to fall.” If we take a conceptual leap, the human body is something that both overflows and is destined to collapse. The body begins dying the moment it is born.

According to Jean-Luc Nancy, when we speak of the body, it is never truly in the body.(1) While alive, our bodies are already the bodies of the dead.(2) We can only recognize our own body through contact with the Other; only by touching ourselves as a surface, as skin, can we become aware of our own corporeality.(3) There’s an old Chinese saying: the easiest thing to draw is a ghost; the hardest, a person. That’s because, while ghosts are imaginary and unverified—there's no way to say they're drawn wrong—people, whom we see every day, immediately reveal any mistake in representation. Despite being acutely attuned to the bodies and images of others, humans are uniquely incapable of adapting to their own aging bodies. We are, in this sense, a shameful species.(4) (A self-portrait requires constant shifting of the gaze—from mirror to canvas—making it difficult to fully reveal one’s whole body.)

In 2021, in my essay "Painter as a Corpse Lover," I described painting as akin to an automaton, a failed Pygmalion, or a failed Frankenstein. Paintings are inanimate things pretending to be alive—just like our collective future as humans—and so, paintings are inherently uncanny. The painters drawn to such works are, by extension, unsettling themselves. I no longer entirely feel the same. Even inanimate things are part of nature—and in a sense, alive. Take Medusa’s statues. The moment she meets the gaze of a subject, she freezes it in place, preventing the body from expanding, leaving only the autoerotic act of the gaze.(5) The subject is reduced to scanning her body with its eyes. The gaze cannot pierce Medusa, but only slides across her surface.(6) Likewise, Medusa can shatter the petrified subject, but she can no longer enter or access what’s inside. Like the volcanic ash in Pompeii that melted the insides and left only a shell, there’s no longer flesh left to pinch. If destruction is not the intent, then all that remains is to look and to grope. Therefore, painting—an act of transferring vision to hand—is an attempt to capture a moving body but inevitably ends up polishing a hardened form. The viewer, in turn, must face the fear of being turned to stone, staring at Medusa and the petrified body.

While preparing for this exhibition, I finally began to understand why I once wrote such a self-deprecating essay like "Painter as a Corpse Lover," even as I loved the living materiality of painting. At the time, I failed to see that automatons, too, could be alive. I’ve long been drawn to paintings like those of Balthus or Giorgio Morandi, works that are built up piece by piece, with great care. Their paintings feel stiff, yet somehow alive. In the catalogue raisonné of Balthus, Jean Clair writes that what sets Balthus apart is that, although he depicts automatons—a symbol of modernity shared with De Chirico and the Surrealists—he prevents the viewer from becoming seduced by them.(7) In the technological age, humanoid automatons are both terrifying, like ancient conquerors' statues, and alluring, like something out of science fiction.(8) But Balthus injects humanity into them, dulling both fear and seduction. He studied classical painting techniques and rejected the perfection of the then-emerging machine age, always infusing his work with a human element.(9) He depicted levitating marionettes as if they were subject to human order—represented by gravity—rather than the logic of machines.(10) Perhaps that’s why his work is often interpreted as perverse or erotic: such depictions demand a witness.(11) In his paintings, the witness becomes an active participant, turning living subjects into mannequins. The girl’s torso, like a wooden box, transforms her into a marionette,(12) and that marionette is depicted as if it follows human rules. (I have no particular interest in the man Balthus. Knowing an artist’s personal history rarely serves us. I simply enjoy Jean Clair’s interpretation, and I take only what I need from Balthus’s paintings.)

Something that erupts while dying. A doll that behaves like a human. Clay hardened and then sprinkled with water to make it slightly pliable again. Earth and dough that once held infinite potential when soft, but whose transformation becomes limited once dried. And yet, they still hold the possibility of change, still belong to the order of nature. This is why I love paint, brushes, and painting. Samuel Beckett, in the painters of misery, describes two kinds of artists. The “object-impeded” artist believes that the object is just itself—and thus, to represent it, one cannot truly see it. The “gaze-impeded” artist believes that they are merely themselves—and thus, to represent, cannot see the object at all.(13) I still don’t quite understand this. Does the first imply that the body is just a body, and that even if we paint the petrified form, the body itself can never be represented? Does the second mean that my own body is just a lump of flesh I can’t fully perceive, and so even if I view it through another’s gaze, I still can’t represent it? What I feel in this incomprehension is a sense of despair born from impossibility—and the ironic attitude of the painter who nonetheless delights in it. But when I actually look at the works of the artists Beckett describes, all those categories vanish. What remains is only the joy of creating the living inanimate—the Caradaverda.

(1) Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus: The Body, Here and Now, Coming from the Outside, trans. Kim Ye-ryeong, Moonji Publishing, 2012, p.10.

(2) Ibid., p.19.