Today, within the field of art, painting remains a profoundly classical genre. It would not be an exaggeration to say that it is one of the forms through which humanity has, over the longest span of time, refined its means of self-expression.

Each of us senses and receives the real world differently. We also desire to reconstruct and express it in the way that feels most fitting, most natural to ourselves. Perhaps for this reason, painting has developed as many modes of expression as its long history would suggest. And so, looking at a painting can often feel somewhat complex, even difficult.

One encounters a similar sensation when faced with the work of Ji Hyo Sup, an artist who has spent a considerable period of time building his own world upon the two-dimensional plane. Dense thickets and plants that fill the picture surface almost chaotically; the faint silhouette of a woman glimpsed between them; fragmented objects, partially broken, placed within an unknowable time and space—these are among the primary elements that make up his paintings. At the same time, the colours of light, set against deep and dark grounds, create delicate layers upon layers, quietly supporting the dominant elements of the image.

The resulting scenes feel unfamiliar, yet they also appear to possess a powerful narrative force. As one finds oneself absorbed in the dancing profusion of brushstrokes, it suddenly occurs that this may, perhaps, be the artist’s “trick”.

If one were to stand before a blank white canvas and look at it for a long while, one would likely begin to feel the urge to draw something onto it. Even a single, very simple line would already contain something. This is because our brains never cease, not even for a moment, to select and reconstruct everything we sense. Such an act reveals something, while at the same time concealing something else. The desire to reveal and the desire to hide always exist together, like two sides of the same coin. What has been sensed is left upon the rectangular plane after passing through certain processes of transformation: thoughts that could not be permitted in reality, actions that were never chosen, feelings that were ultimately never disclosed. We cannot know exactly what processes they pass through, but what accumulates there is the action of countless physical forces, and of time itself.

That such a completed image can seize someone’s gaze and remain imprinted in the mind is, without doubt, remarkable. What is it that captivates us? “Artistic representation”, which fills the empty canvas, is closer to an intentional technique of revealing certain things while concealing others. It is like a veil, one that allows fragments of the self omitted from reality to be carefully hidden away, and then safely looked at. Thanks to this veil, those missing fragments of the self are preserved and sustained.

The work does not ask to be read, nor does it ask to be understood. At the same time, the act of looking at a painting feels, quite intriguingly, like an intense game of hide-and-seek taking place somewhere between resistance and resonance, between the painting and the viewer.

As something that offers us varied and profound ways of thinking about this mechanism, painting remains, in the end, an alien and unfamiliar object—silently withholding the answer to its own riddle. And before it, we continue to look, to ask, to think, and to dream.