The early works of Meeok Paik had the images of nature. The images were in some cases obvious in its sources, and vague in others. Paik’s such approach to the nature began to turn to a different way where more active transformation of its sources led her to move into a dimension of Abstract Expressionistic gesture and expression entirely depending on the use of pigment and media without hinting any legible images. Her recent works since 2000 testifies that the artist has taken a further step toward the ultimate state of abstraction where gestural brushstrokes are much subdued and a single hue fills the entire canvas like monochromatic color field paintings.

Paik paints the overall space of her canvas with a series of the same monochromatic colors or divides it into two separate spaces and juxtaposes two contrasting color fields. She takes a bolder approach in other works where five traditional Oriental colors like ultra marine, white, yellow ocher, carmine red and black, (Translator’s note: these colors are associated in Asian folklore with strong symbolic, myth power) are arrayed in one canvas. To discover a certain strategy in her color abstraction paintings, the monochromatic paintings tend to create a mood of simple and tranquil quality, whereas multi-chromatic paintings with more than two colors take the utmost use of dynamic energy and tension made in the course of collision and reconciliation of coexisting colors.

The first step in her work starts from building the dyed layers of fabric on the canvas. Pigment is soaked into each linen layer and when the artist puts the layers of cotton or linen, she is actually building up the layers of color. Then she scratches some parts or the overall surface of the fabric with blunt-edged knifes and various sizes of wooden bars. Through such process, she enlivens the sense of the material vividly from the accumulated layers and creates a rich texture. The color layers not only shows the materiality but also witnesses the passage of time and natural mechanism.(Translator’s note: Paik produces her color by her own unique way, first by mixing the pigment powder and acrylic and pour the water in the mixture and let the color oozed and condensed from the mixture for three, five or ten days. The differing oozing period produces subtle gradation of one hue. Interestingly enough, her ingredients are chemical and artificial, but the processing to extract a color from them is totally natural.) The repetitive process of accumulation and scratching, and most of all the colors oozed from the pigment mixture, enables the viewer to feel the material in a natural way as if the material expressed itself without any intervention from the artist’s intention.

Paik’s oeuvre and her execution style seem to be originated from a natural combination of the East and the West. The world of the mind in the Orient and the expression using the concrete material in the West are noticed together in her work. For instance, she does not simply cover the surface with the paint, instead she puts the pigment on the top of cotton and linen and waits the liquid absorbed into the fabric. This process is like the method in oriental painting in which black ink seeps into the oriental paper and the two different materials becomes one unity. The next process of adding colors and scratching the layers create a surface with heavy Abstract Expressionistic matiere.

Meeok Paik presents the world of Oriental mind and Western material in her color field abstract paintings. The sheer materiality sensed from the accumulated pigment layers and their rough texture maintains a controlled balance with presence of the natural mind which is felt from the natural oozing process of pigment and the use of traditional Oriental colors.