Suh Se-Ok
When a painter stands in front of a canvas with brush in hand, he should be pugnacious as if wanting to fight a tiger. If he fails to cope with the fierce tiger with the brush in hand, he can never make the space called the canvas his own. When the painter wins over the fierce animal and makes the space his own, he throws away the brush and looks with a smile at the canvas space, which was in a vortex as if an earthquake or a seismic wave had just occurred. This may be seen as excretion relieved of fighting and expression of a painter.
Where do you get inspiration for your works? I get inspiration from all things, and space beyond all those things.
All things start from one single ‘dot’, which extends to develop into one ‘line’. The start and end of this one line are not defined as straight or horizontal. For this reason, one line forms a big circle of infinite size, because, as the circle moves right and left, it generates and annihilates all things, movement and stillness and yin and yang. I understand this circle to be the infinite energy that dominates the universe. This is the start of all things, and the basics of painting. If you explore such thought, you will get an idea as to where a painting began and where it is going.
How are calligraphy and ink painting related to each other? Calligraphy in the East started from seeing all things and expressing them in drawing. With the passage of time, both ‘characters’ and ‘calligraphy’ came into being side-by-side. In other words, ‘calligraphy’ is characters that developed into an artistic expressive technique. To develop simple characters into an artistic expressive technique, the basic techniques and logic used for painting were applied. The techniques and logic of calligraphy were also eventually applied to ink painting, and the two have influenced each other ever since. It should be clearly understood that calligraphy and ink painting are done with the same materials and tools, that is, ink and brush. Calligraphy and ink painting share expressive techniques and spirit. However, as calligraphy is by definition impossible without ‘characters’, it has always been limited in a way, unlike painting.
What is your greatest accomplishment as an artist? Let’s assume that we each live for one hundred years. This is hardly the blink of an eye in the context of space and time. We throw all our efforts into our lives, but we only live as long as our physical body, which is as small as an insect, remains viable. We all show a small part of our lives. Therefore, there is no such thing like perfection in life or in art. If there were, people in the next generation would lose all interest in life, or life would lose meaning. No painter will, and has ever been, complete about all things. Thus, life remains incomplete forever.
How would you characterize the relationship between Korean calligraphy and European calligraphy? For example, the calligraphy and arts of Korea and Japan in the 1960s exerted great influence on Dotremont and Alechinsky in Europe. I know nothing about calligraphy in Europe. I have not yet seen any European works of calligraphy that evince the expressive techniques or logic of characters of any European language, as in Korea, China, and Japan where characters have developed and become elaborate over an extraordinarily long period of time and eventually became incorporated in calligraphy.
For me, ‘nothingness premises something’ and ‘being new premises being old’. All things are work of abundant energy that spins round and round. I strive to be free from and transcend the sense of ‘losing’ and ‘gaining’.
How will the future influence your work? What do you think about the future of ink painting and calligraphy? Since I don’t even know what will happen today, how can I speculate about tomorrow or the future? Water and air cannot be cut into pieces like wood. Like air unbounded, the past, present, and future will go on together forever. The same thing looks very different depending on the direction from which you look at it. We may think that all things change constantly, and vice versa; we may think that nothing changes all the time. The only difference is between seeing near and narrowly and seeing far and widely.
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