ln her solo exhibition “The Essence", Gu Ae-Kyung presents the results of her recent years of sculptural experimentation with the material properties of hanji (traditional Korean paper). The author analyzes and interprets the artist's recent works under the theme of "Exploring the Essence of Painting and the Materiality of Hanji."

Let's consider this: What is the essence of painting? Throughout art history, there have been various debates on the essence of painting, such as "magical representation that frames reality," "the painter's subjective expression," "geometric abstraction in search of a reductive order," or "expressionistic abstraction that conveys emotion." However, today, the medium-specific characteristic of "two-dimensional flatness" seems to be largely conceptualized as the essence of painting.

​

Of course, nowadays, the realm of painting is not confined solely to the two-dimensional medium, as it also embraces everything expanding into three-dimensional forms, such as painterly sculpture, sculptural painting, or installation painting. This is because not only the medium but also the method and attitude of creating paintings are sometimes considered equally important.

​

Gu Ae-Kyung's recent work claims to uphold both of these perspectives on painting. The 19th-century statement by Maurice Denis that painting is "a plane covered with colors arranged in a certain order" and the mid-20th-century view of Clement Greenberg, who considered the "limitations of the two-dimensional flatness of the medium" as the nature of modernist painting, are adopted and reinterpreted in Koo's work. She reaches the point of considering the paper support itself (two-dimensional flatness)—without the use of paint or color (the method and attitude of creation)—as painting.

​

The author interprets Gu Ae-Kyung's recent works that explore the essence of painting through the following specific categories:

1. Exploration of grids and the escape from flatness

2. The materiality of substances, traces of matter, and the visualization of the invisible as a question about essence

3. The aesthetics of chance and emptiness in the flow of time

4. Repetitive gestures of performativity, formal variations, and material imagination

Let's delve into these keywords while examining her work to fully grasp their meaning.

 

First, let's discuss “the exploration of grids and the escape from flatness.” Gu Ae-Kyung begins her work by attaching three-ply hanji (traditional Korean paper) onto a canvas. Once the hanji is fixed to the canvas, she draws or marks grids with a pencil or the tip of a steel pen at regular intervals. Then, using a sharp knife (or sometimes a water-soaked brush), she follows the grid lines to separate and cut into the surface of the hanji. Afterward, she painstakingly lifts each individual square from the top layer of hanji along the grid’s cut lines, one piece at a time, investing long hours of labor into the process.

 As a result, while the center of each square grid module remains attached to the three-ply hanji, the edges of each module are slightly lifted away from the surface. This work, where part of the top layer of paper is attached to the base and another part is peeled away like a shell, creates a “low-relief three-dimensional painting that simultaneously exists as a flat work yet escapes flatness.”

Why does Gu Ae-Kyung focus on creating three-dimensional grids on hanji? From the artist's note, where she states, "The grid is the essence of painting," we can infer that her work aims to inherit the status of traditional painting while reinterpreting it in a contemporary context. Similar to how Western landscape and still-life paintings would slice reality into a square frame and fill it with representation, Gu Ae-Kyung fills each of these square frames with expressions of non-representation or abstraction, endlessly expanding in the form of a grid.

​

The concept of essence, meaning "the fundamental nature or important inner quality of an object"—Hypokeimenon in Greek—was understood in ancient philosophy, like Plato's idea or Aristotle's substance, as the "unchanging substance beneath changing phenomena." However, in modern philosophy, it was replaced by "material substance," such as Descartes' ego or John Locke's idea of that which "allows sensory properties to exist independently." Furthermore, with the rise of 20th-century phenomenology, the philosophical explanation of essence as "infinity or eternity" evolved. Phenomenology introduced the notion that "essence appears through phenomena," thus making a fixed understanding of essence no longer possible.

​

So, how can we find the "unchanging and invisible"? Gu Ae-Kyung practices a visual interpretation of Bergson's philosophy, which argues that "essence cannot be grasped through observation and analysis but can be discovered through intuition that reaches the creative duration (durée) of life." She does this through intuition projected onto the material properties of substances and material painting, and through its effective practice.

 Third, let’s discuss "the aesthetics of chance and emptiness with the passage of time." As much as Gu Ae-Kyung's work explores the material aesthetics of hanji (traditional Korean paper), it also accompanies the aesthetics of chance and emptiness over time. Interestingly, in philosophy, chance has often been regarded not as essence but as non-essential. What about emptiness? At least in Western philosophical thought, emptiness is not a typical direction of practice. In Koo Ae-Kyung's work, however, one can glimpse Buddhist philosophy, which defines essence as emptiness  and puts it into practice. This is achieved through necessity born from chance, fullness through emptiness, and the practice of making the invisible visible.

​

Let’s examine her work. In  Gu Ae-Kyung's pieces, through the process of cutting out the gridlines on hanji and lifting the top layer, the work becomes semi-three-dimensional, subtly revealing the underlying surface of the second layer of hanji beneath the cut grid. Through the practice of cutting (emptying), the hidden surface of the second layer of paper, which was concealed beneath the outermost three-ply hanji, is finally revealed.

Additionally, while experimenting with pushing hanji using water to softly express the cut edges of the grid, the soft wrinkles and material traces that appear within the work effectively demonstrate the aesthetics of chance and emptiness. In other words, in Koo Ae-Kyung's work, the creation of the grid's boundary lines can be explained as achieving the aesthetics of emptiness (more precisely, the aesthetics of  "filling through emptying") by transforming pencil lines (flatness) into incision lines (negative relief) or forming wrinkles (positive relief) when met with water.

​

But there's more. In the process of erasing the initial pencil lines drawn to create the grid on the hanji in order to softly cut the outer edges, the paper fibers that appeared on the surface of the hanji, as the pencil lines were erased, reveal material traces in place of the removed lines. This also embodies the aesthetics of chance and emptiness. Therefore, the erased (emptied) space left by the paper fibers and the material traces (filled space) they leave behind make it easy to define these works—despite the absence of paint—as not just flat works, but as paintings (relief painting, tactile painting, material painting). They can indeed be considered paintings that realize fullness through emptiness.

​

Finally, let's discuss the “repetitive gestures of performativity, formal variations, and material imagination.”Gu Ae-Kyung’s works, where a single layer of hanji is cut into countless grid modules and lifted into delicate forms, remind us of the artist’s repetitive and laborious gestures as well as the material imagination embedded in the work. The intensity of labor required to focus on creating these grid modules, each with its own subtle expression, is beyond ordinary. Furthermore, the experimental variations in her process to seek the best outcome are numerous. She experiments with changes in the size and number of grid modules and the canvas, adding color to the entire surface of the hanji in yellow or green, or applying color only to certain modules to create variation.

There are also noteworthy variations in how she lifts the grid modules: either lifting all the square edges of the grid, raising only the intersection points between modules in a cross (+) shape, or creating grids across the entire background while leaving one side intact.

​

What we must keep in mind is that the core of the diverse variations presented in Koo Aekyung’s work is created through deep reflection and experimentation on the material properties of *hanji* (Korean paper) and the traces of matter. This is the fundamental reason why her work is referred to as "material painting," "relief painting," or "haptic painting" in this essay. It can be explained that the images Koo Aekyung delves into are those that explore materiality and its tactile qualities, rather than simulacra or illusory representations.

 The thoughts of Henri Bergson, who claimed that "images are essentially matter," and Gaston Bachelard, who emphasized the significance of "material imagination" that constantly dreams of new changes, are evident throughout Koo Aekyung's *Essence* series. Her recent works explore, on a close level, the essence of painting by experimenting with the material properties of *hanji* and its plastic variations, while on a broader level, they deeply reflect on the "essence of existence," aligned with human existentialism. These works can certainly be seen as opening a new horizon in post-monochrome painting.