ARTIST PAGE PRESS BIO
JIWON SON
ARTIST STATEMENT
Although the title of my current field paintings- Aggregates-refers to the build-up of patterns into an excessive, hypnotic surface, it also captures the accumulation and overlap of the disparate influences, impulses and experiences that have led me to this body of work.
MOUNTAINS. TEMPLES
One of the most influential and core experiences came very early. I was born in Korea in a mountainous region banking Kim Cheon. I recall the striking beauty of the mountains, the sacred contemplative Buddhist temples and traditional rural Korean folk culture. I spent many child- hood days sifting through the rugged, rural landscape surrounding our village. When I felt adventurous, I would sneak into one of the local Buddhist temples. These elaborately decorated temples punctuated the terrain and seduced me with their interior spaces completely covered with colorful patterns. Both the ornate system of patterns and the ebb and flow of remote nature inspired a sense of awe and quiet reverence, and I think the residue of these early experiences ground my process as well as the finished work.
MEDICAL IllUSTRATION
My desire to understand and articulate intricate systems links the aggregate paintings with my prior profession, medical illustration. My cadaver work in college literally revealed the body as a staggeringly complex aggregate of systems, yet I found the necessary destruction of the body horrific, a too-costly price for the unveiling. After college, as a medical illustrator working on medical legal cases, I represented physiological and anatomical systems of the body in large-scale graphics that combined realistic rendering and schematics. Used to educate juries, these boards depicted dramatic stories, oftentimes comparing healthy systems to those same systems when they malfunction. Although I now encountered the body as linework and color, the relentless barrage of work-related injuries, auto accidents, disease, deformations of flesh and organs, and pain and suffering due to medical malpractice transformed the body so beautiful to me in Renaissance drawings into a frail and messy thing, and I abandoned the figure in my studio work. With the aggregate patterns, I feel as if I am nurturing my love of systems under a more rational guise, a therapeutic counterbalance to the weight of the broken body. And the latest works allow strains of chaos and accident to re-enter in the backgrounds.
IKEBANA
Ikebana, the Zen artform of Japanese flower arranging, offered the counterbalance to medical illustration. Over the years of study with my Ikebana master, Ikka Nakashima, I've sought out nature's own patterns of order. Ikebana requires sensitizing oneself to the biography expressed in each instance of each material-the twist of a tree branch, a particular pattern of leaves, a leaning cluster of buds and flowers- and shaping and configuring these eccentricities into an ideal. The arranging process is guided by traditionally proscribed compositions and proportion systems. Ikebana calms and quiets my mind and rewards an empathetic, deliberate touch. As with my Aggregates, serenity, order, structure, control, contemplation and routine are all important themes of Ikebana practice.
EASTERN PAINTING TECHNIQUES AND SUBJECTS
I also have an interest in Chinese, Korean and Japanese ink paintings, particularly those from the 15th-18th centuries. One scroll painting in particular-Mu Ch'i's 'Six Persimmons'-embodies the way these artists approached a subject. Mu Ch'i meditated on an arrangement of persimmons until he felt he understood the essence of the fruits. Only then, in a swift and spontaneous gesture, did he paint this essence. Meditation came before-and not with-the act of painting: painting released and set the stored energy. I'm intrigued with Mu Ch'i's attempt to seize the fugitive aspects of the thing and represent it. My peony series carries this same impulse. And my “An Importation of Six Persimmons” is a direct homage to Mu Ch'i with several Western twists: first, meditation and painting are, for me, simultaneous, and second, his persimmons arrive on my canvas as apples. This period of Asian paintings added one other crucial element to my work: It was here in the way these works were presented-framed on all sides with large silk brocade panels-that I initially conceived the idea to tromp l'oeil silk brocade.
WESTERN PAINTING TECHNIQUES AND SUBJECTS
Velazquez, Rembrandt, Sargent and Chase greatly influenced not only the looser technique of my earlier representational work (as evidenced in the peony paintings), but the decision to draw fabric out of its context as well. As I studied their portrait paintings, I began to notice a common element: the care and detail with which each artist treated the fabric of the wardrobes worn by their aristocratic subjects. The lush and luxuriously rendered patterns and textures serve as indices for the regal subject, yes, but they also exhibit a pure joy of painting fabric. After encountering so many instances of this, I wondered if the faces and hands of these paintings weren't just the necessary appendages to legitimate the subject that really held these painters-fabric and pattern. And I began to ask this of myself as well. At the time, I was encircling representational paintings with a series of canvases painted to mimic the silk brocade fabric that frames traditional Asian ink paintings. But I found myself drawn to these peripheral paintings, the all-over patterned surface both minimal and excessive, both representational and hypnotically abstract. Why not move this peripheral framing device to the center? Why not lay fields of pure pattern?
TUG AND PULL
The move towards pure pattern and the tug and pull of reduction and excess have been as much a process of self-discovery as they are a ritual for centering myself in the present moment. At times, the repetition required of pattern painting is a source of great comfort: Through repetition, I act out my desire for control and a way of staving off change and chaos through structured predictability. The repetition cultivates a keen sense of observation and a commitment to craft and discipline. At other times, painting in such a confined latitude is quite laborious, mundane, and physically rigorous. I oscillate between moments of complete peace and subtle boredom, between rest and restlessness. Somewhere between contentment and contempt, the painting is born. And throughout, beauty- or rather, its slow emergence- drives me.
is. 2004
P.O. Box 267870, Chicago, IL 60626 / Ph 312.654.0144 / byronroche@sbcglobal.net