Luna Kim

Living life as a subject is not a reality for me. To relieve myself of the burden of responsibility, I often suppress my desires and submit to discipline. However, there are times when I yearn to be a subject and give in to my desires, like an uninvited guest. In my imagination, my desires often take on violent and deadly forms, but ultimately remain unresolved as they are purely a figment of my imagination. This is where painting comes in. Painting serves as a warm act of violence that allows me to give in to my desires without harming anyone. Painting is a living thing and during the process, I feel a sense of freedom as well as being consumed by it. It becomes a tug-of-war between the painter and the painting, with both vying for control. I often let go of control and then objectify the painting, repeatedly trying to regain control.

This alternation of control occurs during the painting process. When I paint violent images based on my imagination, I focus on the materiality of the paint and the tools that deliver it. Two moments continuously call to each other. Even if I initially plan to paint a harmonious combination of primary colors in a dry and flat manner, the painting can still react spontaneously, causing dirty paint to flow and smear with my hands. At the end of the process, the painting is a mixture of both planned and unplanned elements, creating an awkward and heterogeneous appearance until the completion stage. This characteristic reflects a sense of incompleteness, even in relation to my own paintings.

My work can be broadly divided into two parts, depending on which of the aforementioned processes is more dominant. Firstly, when an impulse is projected into an image, the shape becomes important. Whether the shape was planned from the start or created in the middle, I allow for free brush work in relation to the shape. The painting depicts a scene, with the words on the front and back serving as the title. For example, "Digestion" is a title that comes from the story of a decaying body, while "Invasion" portrays the explosion of two people's intestines, causing their blood to seep into each other. Secondly, I use conversation as a figurative language. At this stage, painting becomes a trace of the body, naturally approaching the non-conceptual. "Skin" is a painting of a person's skin as if I were feeling the weight, texture, and temperature of the paint with my fingers after squeezing the colors I see in the human body.

The second task extends to something more figurative. "The Spanking and the Spanked" began with the regret of forgetting the subject who applied the motion in the drawing process and leaving only the target painting. I put a stone or nail in a cloth pocket and hit the screen with paint, then dismantled the pocket and connected it like a piece of cloth. The combination of the heavily hit screen and the beaten fabric existed separately. "Veil", on the other hand, was filmed and printed in 10 meters after drawing a small picture. It underwent a planned transformation of digital editing and an unpredictable transformation of printing. In existing works, where the desire to control and vent were mixed in one painting, these two aspects are divided into different processes in my paintings. I struggle in such ways to become a complete self, despite conflicting needs.