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Eternity and a Day
The
Plane of Meditation and Belief
There have been times artists believed they could unearth the
truth of art by removing perspective, shade, and depth in painting. Western
painting theories made this assertion in the late 19th and early 20th century.
In the 1960s artists believed pigments were dedicated to unveiling the truth of
art. After the post-modernist era, artists became sick of such artistic
overturns and criticisms. They have lived through the period when works that
are like hollow gestures of avant-garde art were in the limelight. What is left
now?
Shading, an element of painting that disappeared in the early
20th century, is revived in Hwang In-ran’s
plane with subjective, freestanding characteristics. Leaves and their shadows,
a half open window and its window frame, a bird flapping its wings, and someone
who seems lost in their memories are depicted against the backdrop of a wall.
As in Eternity and a Day, a film by
Theodoros Angelopoulos, Hwang’s work of the same title is both a landscape
painting and a figure painting of tranquility and serenity.
A wall minutely constructed of horizontal, vertical, and
oblique lines with a blue base act as the background of the whole scene. The
bird, figure, and tree portrayed on the wall appear balanced. The lines drawn
on the wall lead each object illustrated on the same plane to a subtle
difference of time. Twigs and leaves depicted with silhouettes bring forth a
sensation of flowing time. A bird flapping its wings generates ripples in its
surrounding area due to an expression of movement. However, the rippling effect
does not reach the figure who appears lonely.
Temporality is insinuated by the many layers of marks added
or scribbled on
the blue ground that appears monotonous. This temporality leads viewers to
think of the artist’s time spent laboring and struggling with the canvas. This
is another form of Hwang’s work. She seems to be able to do figurative work
without abandoning planeness thanks to her solid beliefs. The artist tries to
grasp, keep, concentrate on, and gaze at something evanescent, as well as
imprint on and become one with it. Her work is to display the plane of
meditation and belief.
A
right to dream of solitude
“I do not know what really is but if there is
solitude, we have the right to dream of it as in heaven. I have at times
dreamed of solitude as any people. But, two angels guarding the doorway always
prevent me from entering into it. An angel has the face of my friend while
another is that of a foe. Some says it is only a few hours that people live
with all their heart. This assertion is true in a sense but not true in another
sense.”
- L'Envers et
l'endroit (The
Wrong Side and the Right Side) by Albert Camus
Solitude perhaps meets eternity. Hwang’s solid
plane as the world of silhouettes where solitude and silence are set in harmony
is away from the reality fraught with all types of absurdity, injustice, and
acrimoniousness. This is of course when her plane is in contrast with any
utterly concrete reality. When we feel tired of our age overflowing with
ambiguity, confusion, form and meaning. We come to have a longing for original
form.
We are curious about moving and beautiful things,
the origin of love or solitude, the source of jealousy. We thus tried to
regenerate Greek classics in the Renaissance and Romanticism of the 18th
century in the postmodern era. Our desire in original form meets eternity in
contemporary art in which we feel boredom as it has always pursued the new and
in our ever-changing, clamorous reality. It is Hwang’s aesthetic belief through
which she sees the reality.
As one acts based on their moral, religious, and
his or her political inclination, an artist practices work anchored in his or
her own artistic belief. The images frozen to silence and solitude Hwang has
pursued are to lend the pure temporality of eternity to a day fraught with
clamors in reality. We can say a precious moment is eternal. We were all
perhaps born for a clear day.
