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Sand Sledding Slope #5, 2020, oil on canvas, 200×500cm. Image provided by Incheon Art Platform.

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The large white canvas is divided diagonally by one man’s body. The man’s face is hidden by soaring smoke—the aftermath of the collision. As I stare at this scene, a strange feeling arises. Why is the man sinking his head? His stiff body and the crinkled texture contribute to this feeling of pressure. The appearance of dense material in the background, which cannot be liquid, prompts us to imagine the magnitude of the shock. This strange sensation is further aggravated by the contrast of the white color that explodes from the collision point. The narrative of the shock is written on the image.

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Moving along a few steps in the gallery, you will see a landscape painting that depicts a few trees growing sparsely on a heel. The color is more faded than verdant, and a disparate shape cuts into a hill composed of scratches, the material traces of a sharp tool. The shape reveals itself as a tractor and the man who is painting. Given the tractor, perhaps it should be called a construction site rather than a hill. Thinking that this very painting could be what the man is painting in the scene, the audience’s question moves to the painter inside of the painting: Why is he there and what is he seeing?

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These two images comprise LIM Nosik's Sand Sledding Slope (2020) series, first shown in the exhibition Non-self Standings (Amado Art Space, Seoul, 2020). From the series title, the audience can gather that the place where the man's head is sinking, and the place that the painter is located, is a ‘sand sledding slope’. Though this phrase stimulates our imagination, it does not give us a clear understanding. The strange story of the paintings continually shape shifts and unfolds.

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Sand Sledding Slope #1-4, 2020, oil on canvas, 200×600cm. Image provided by Incheon Art Platform.

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Another name for the landscape in Sand Sledding Slope is ‘the dredged soil of Namhan River,’ which may be summarized as follows. The massive heap of earth which came from the Four Major Rivers Project was piled here at Yeoju City. Though soon to be sold, due to issues with the project the sale became unclear, and the soil became a headache in the town. It was a nuisance for the farmland which is occupied by the soil. The operating expense exceeded the selling expense, and the opening of the sand sledding slope was a part of the failed project. The artist, whose hometown is Yeoju, has seen the dramas surrounding the dredged soil from a close distance. Even after many twists and turns, the soil remains a mountain.

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Hearing this story, the social issue at the center resonates with the painting immediately, as if the faded green shows the fate of artificial nature with its many ups and downs, and as if the stiff action of the man demonstrates the conflicts and foolish acts surrounding the case of the earth pile. However, it is dangerous to attach all aspects of this painting to the issue. The emphasized brushstrokes, the subtle colors, the shape of a painter, and so on, are pictorial factors which make the message of the painting too ambiguous to be propaganda. Simultaneously, the drawing as an object within the image grounds the painting, turning the audience's attention to the pictorial process.

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The artist planned for the work to be “an experiment that extends the spot the object is discovered and the perspective in between the movement that realizes the spot.” ¹⁾ This experiment is based on the physical distance between Yeoju and Incheon primarily. By taking the condition of physical distance, which directly reminds us of the gap between the represented object and the act of representation, the pictorial system which mediates and shows the object is established. In the dual process of copying and drawing what he produced from the landscape of Yeoju on a canvas at his studio in Incheon, the physical distance between the two cities transforms into the representative distance. Due to this exposed sense of distance, it is hard to say that the picture is a landscape of Yeoju, and it becomes remote to read the painting as a story of the dredged soil of the Namhan River.

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Branch 630, 2019, oil on canvas, 270×510cm. Image provided by Incheon Art Platform.

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Frame, 2020, acrylic on wall, 275×850cm. Image provided by Incheon Art Platform.

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The artist has continuously been conscious of the distance between the depicted object and the act of depicting. In his early works, this distance of the object and the acts of turning the objects into painting are very closely attached both psychologically and physically, that it is barely seen. For instance, in View from the Inside (OCI Museum of Art, Seoul, 2016), LIM realistically represented what he experienced at his father’s farm. His other works, such as Folded Time (Hapjungjigu, Seoul, 2017), capture scenes of the road from the artist’s daily commute in the form of accumulation of drawings. Distinctively, in his recent works, he has moved his attention to the inevitable gap between the represented object and the act created through the frame of painting, rather than trying to secure the trueness of representation by reducing the distance. And thus, he has been developing devices to reveal the gap.

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The ‘distance’ that surely occurs in representation has been a long-standing issue in painting. Given the medium’s long history, it has accumulated many visual devices to respond to this issue. In this context, in LIM Nosik’s recent exhibition, Pebble Skipping (Art Space Boan2, Seoul, 2020), the artist used a truly historical device to put the distance in his screen. He complicated the layers of representation by inserting objects characteristic of images such as mirrors and paintings, as well as depictions of a window, which is a symbol of transparent representation, though it is clouded by rainwater and dust, breaking the flow of natural gaze, and highlighting the object that cannot be seen. With these devices, the self-portrait of the artist appears here and there, showing his critical mind as a painter who depicts the opacity of images.

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Exhibition view of LIM Nosik: Pebble Skipping (Art Space Boan2, Seoul, 2020). Image provided by Incheon Art Platform.

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Is the artist repeating the eschatology of the impossibility of representation? If so, painting is only a failed medium which has lost the qualification to speak on anything other than painting itself. Nevertheless, in LIM Nosik’s paintings, the distance between the represented object and the act of representation is not infinite but stops at a certain level. What holds the distance between the two is nothing but the artist’s experience. The dredged soil is a new environment unfolded before his eyes as well as a conversation topic with his father. As the person concerned with the case, the artist’s experience operates as the oughtness of the representation and prompts him to attempt to positively connect the distance, which seems impossible. The work itself becomes the ground for pictorial play where he tests the possibility and impossibility of the assignment of how to treat reality while he faces the limitation of himself.

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Through the series of Sand Sledding Slope, I have been told of the paintings in which object and act, as well as story and form, are out of joint. This dislocation is an issue that contemporary painting now faces fundamentally. It is the issue of whether painting can secure its contemporaneity.

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What can painting do in this age after the supposed end of painting? Painting is an impoverished medium. Its status as a major image-production device has been taken away, it cannot escape the dishonor of post-historicity if it depends on abstraction and gets caught in self-contradiction as it tries to follow the digital visual environment. It seems hard for a painting to speak out about the present in its own language and convince its raison d'être. By facing this current situation, LIM’s painting skirts and stays silent while he honestly accepts what is inevitable and tries to construct a system which avoids the lies that may occur through hasty conviction. As he does so, it seems he is exploring a very small territory of what painting can do, nonetheless.

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Simultaneously, in this arranged territory created by keeping a distance between seeing, speaking, and drawing, there is a balanced coexistence with the inevitably eliminated things and his will to hold them together. I believe that this contradiction is where the story of all paintings begins.

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[Footnote]

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¹⁾ LIM Nosik, “Pebble Skipping Artist’s statement_After”, 2020.

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※ This content was first published in 『2020 Incheon Art Platform Residency Program Catalogue』, and re-published here with the consent of Incheon Art Platform