2023-04-28 20:00:03
When I meet a person with a clear expression, my mind flashes. Would you say it’s a clear and bright face? Sometimes there are people like that in the photos. A person whose eyes do not blur even when he passes through the camera lens. There are faces with strong persuasive power that seem to pull people inside the photo paper. I had a similar experience when looking at our old portraits.
Kim Ji-eun Professor, Department of Literature, Seoul Institute of the Arts, Critic of Children’s Literature
It is known that the portrait of Jiksoo Seo, a tattoo during the reign of King Yeongjo of the Joseon Dynasty, was painted by Lee Myeong-gi for the face and Kim Hong-do for the body. This was in 1796, when there was no photographic technology. Seo Jik-soo wrote on the upper right of the portrait he painted, “They are famous painters, but I couldn’t draw my heart in one piece. I’m sorry,” he writes. However, this painting radiated more brilliance than any image I had ever seen.
I saw a copy of Seo Jik-soo’s portrait in the exhibition ‘Including People’ by Baek Ji-hye, who received a doctorate in portrait technique and figure painting research in the late Joseon Dynasty. Because it is a small exhibition space, she was able to observe his face from a hair-to-hair distance. This portrait would have shown him better than any high-quality mirror of the late 18th century. Nevertheless, what Seo Jik-soo was not satisfied with was not the completeness of the painting, but rather the regret that his efforts to know his inner self did not come to fruition even with outstanding paintings.
A picture book written by 2018 Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk and illustrated by Joanna Conceiyo <잃어버린 얼굴>read Here too comes the story of a man’s face. The original Polish title of this book is ‘pan wyrazisty’, which deals with the life of a person who likes to take pictures. The main character had a clear face that would be memorable at a glance. It was such a comfortable face that everyone regarded it as a friend. The main character likes his own face like that, so he bought a mobile phone with excellent camera function, took pictures of himself excitedly, and posted them here and there. His face has been floating around the internet. Then one day, I get the feeling that the lines on his face have dulled. More and more, it became indistinguishable from the faces of others. The main character tries to ignore this change.
The ‘clear man’ makes a serious choice to solve the problem of his face. Olga Tokarczuk’s clear sentences tell the result like the sound of shoe hooves. What captivated me was the painting of Joanna Conceillo. The artist drew many pictures taken by the main character. There were photos of the main character’s childhood, but the change begins when the photo, which existed only in his family’s album, is uploaded to the media. The process of a clear man becoming an unclear man in the book is described as an increase in pixels and defective pixels in the photo. The clarity of the face disappears and the original existence disappears in the floating pixels. How can he get himself back?
I visited the lecture hall after hearing that Joanna Conceiyo had come to Seoul for the ‘Masters of Polish Illustration’ exhibition. The magical realism he showed in this book was the result of countless trials and errors. He never let go of his pencil, even during his vacation, and painted these drawings for several years in Argenteuil in France, Pagogina in Poland, Sarmede in Italy, and Obidos in Portugal. In the book, only a small part of what he painted so far remains. Joanna Conceiyo, who is challenging the time of her hand and pencil to the point of being obstinate in an age of replication and loss full of selfies, asked the audience: “Are we looking at all the pictures we took?”
This book makes us sit in front of the camera for the purpose of ‘knowing ourselves’, not to show it to others. What did I take today? Aren’t the contours of the face a bit duller? It’s time to gently lift your finger and touch my jawline.
#숨 #Touch #face #Kyunghyang #Shinmun