Mee Ok, Paik is an existential artist who explores color, canvas and act of painting, the essential and basic elements of painting, and works towards identifying life with art. With her fascination in colors, she has been trying to paint the color itself onto the canvas since her days in graduate school. Her drastic efforts to represent the substance of color resulted in painting subjects into non-materials and metaphysical expressions making them abstract.
I. Sea of Colors
In this exhibition, the textile work painted in dark blue is the representative piece expressing Mee Ok, Paik’s work style and way of life. The work, which seems like a sea colored with a lump of blue pigment, is displayed in the exhibition hall like a colored band creating a magical and pure atmosphere in the white space. The edges of the canvas are threading, vaguely disturbing the boundary of the wall space. There is a ball of threads in the middle of canvas that look as if they were originally from the threading edges. It is colored into a blue ball, emphasizing the material aspect of the color itself. At a glance, this work may seem like a simple color-field abstract painting of monochrome, but looking more closely, a delicate matière of hard work is evident. Mee Ok, Paik repetitively colored the gaps between the woofs and warp threads of the canvas fabric to achieve the desired color and unthreaded the edges one by one. She suppresses her tempestuous emotions of life, such as fright, despair, greed, passion, hatred and love, and holds herself strong with moderation and reason through the repetitive action.
The cobalt blue changes into a blue-black color with her countless repetitive action. It represents the image of her endless exploration into material and mind, reality and ideal, land and space. This art piece makes you feel the heavy and dark sorrow of abstract painters who rush towards an ideal and then find themselves sinking deep in their inner self. It is their way of questioning their very existence to which they never find any answers, just like the sufferings of the monks who consistently sacrifice and discipline themselves to find answers. The fabric art pieces, connecting the whole exhibition space like a sea, make you realize what a lonely work of perseverance it must have been, laboring hours over a long period of time.
Mee Ok, Paik however, has naturally opened a possibility to observe and communicate with the world. The threading becomes a part of the matière surface and colored to create waves, as if it is an energy accumulated just before the Big Bang or a new life form waiting for birth. The threads on the edges are windpipes open for communication.
II. Spots, Touches
The artist accepts the principles of the world and universe comfortably due to her experience and wisdom of age. The threading edges are touched with the paintbrush and changed to start communicating with the world. A peaceful and natural thinking is expressed in various colors with the paintbrush, which was attained by understanding the principle of harmony that does not tip to either side of material and mind, human and nature, moderation and reason, tradition and mixture.
She realizes the limitations of man and recognizes the frail existence of man before god. Thus, she comes to accept that living in harmony with her surroundings and taking small actions in reality are a process of heading towards a higher level. The artist looks around her surrounding and breathes together with it. She finds equilibrium in her inner and spiritual world. The world of spots created from the tip of her paintbrush is the breath of painting. The colored spots covering the surface show the co-existence of the functions of experience, imagination, memory, present and past, thus creating a living painting of vibration.
Mee Ok, Paik’s touch gradually becomes more and more natural and free. Her act of painting dances together with the paintbrush. One color is not an endless exploration between material and non-material, but a fun dance accepting the world with the whole body. Everything about life, as well as the civilization and history of human, have become the roots of transcendental body to be embodied unconsciously. The artist naturally reveals the touches of the paintbrush and connects it supernaturally. The wonderful body gestures and hidden wildness and primitiveness expressed only when the artist is preoccupied in the artwork are clearly expressed. Here is the eruption of the metaphor of human history and experience.
III. Monotone
Mee Ok, Paik finishes with reason and works on hiding her inner passion. She puts touches of spot as if covering up with one color, but a line of magnificent inner color is faintly visible. Abundant but unrevealed, an empirical aesthetic of modesty exists in that simple line of color. Her monotone works are expressed in a harmony of retreat and diffusion, simplicity and magnificence, emanation and moderation. The monochrome painting is an affirmation of existence through the rhythm of inherence, rather than unlimited, magnificence. This work is in the same context as the first blue pigment work, but it is not a yearning of a vague metaphysic. It is an exploration of chaos which looks into dynamic aspects. Monotone is a filtering of the artist’s various attempts in her experience with colors and exploration of life. It exists because so many countless life experiences have trembled, shuddered, been shaken and stirred.
IV. Frames and Mixing
Mee Ok, Paik put the little canvas work into a frame, mixed and installed together with several canvas works, questioning the painting itself.
The small canvas work is composed of wonderful monotone colors hiding numerous touches. Putting it in a frame, the abstract image of the painting is accentuated more clearly. The touches of paintbrush make spots and lines inside the frame, as if they express a part of an object or nature, such as sea, sky, lake and landscape. The abstract painting does not reveal any division or illusion in the form and background, allowing the viewer to interpret the image individually. It is unlike the abstract painting space of modernism which steps over to other spaces identifying the existence of the painting itself. It creates several layers of metaphorical and magical space, creating an image inside the frame. In addition, the artist turned the whole exhibition space into a work of art by mixing and installing it with other canvas works.
One can feel the artist’s natural thinking, attained after practicing the sincerity of human intelligence to the fullest, and the observation, leisure and humor acquired form experience. Through this exhibition, it is evident that Mee Ok, Paik has become an artist fully experienced in all the senses who naturally corresponds with the times and consistently attempts changes together with her spirit of art.
