Beyond the Aesthetics of The Foolish Old Man Who Moves the Mountain

The artist Shi Tao from the late Ming and early Qing dynasties boldly declared, “The act of drawing a single stroke is the foundation of ten thousand strokes and the source of all phenomena.” In painting, drawing the first line on a blank canvas is akin to the creation of the heavens and the earth, the Alpha and the Omega. Before a line is drawn, the space can be described as chaotic or even fictitious. However, once a line is drawn on the canvas, distinctions emerge, boundaries are established, and inside and outside are divided depending on the position of the drawing subject. A line drawn on a flat surface becomes a plane that divides, and a line crossing space becomes a gap, creating an interstitial space. That night after I viewed the paintings of the artist Suh Jeong Min, I struggled to sleep. I was first overwhelmed by the Sisyphus effort required to create the massive canvases filled with small pieces made by cutting, rolling, splitting, and pasting Hanji, rather than using pigments. The suffocating spectacle of these densely packed, embedded pieces evoked a sense of obsessive compulsion. I felt chased by something, growing increasingly anxious. When I handled the small bundle of paper pieces I brought from the studio, I even felt a sensory discomfort so intense that it gave me goosebumps. The touch of the bundle, containing over a hundred small paper pieces, was oddly reminiscent of soft plastic or smooth Styrofoam. My perception and senses were continually at odds, and this dissonance itself felt like a line or a gap. The canvas, densely layered with pieces of Hanji, appeared as a cross-section of nature or the universe itself. The work “Line 10, 2022” seemed to tear through space like lightning in the night sky, while the “Journey of Lines” series felt like the tentacles of marine life living in clusters. “Line 5, 2022”, “Line 6, 2022” and “Line 7, 2022” immediately evoked feelings of vitality, pulsation, or even a blind will to survive. Yet, this wave of the universe, nature, and life didn’t seem like mine or ours but rather appeared as Suh Jeong Min’s own universe and nature.