The Moment He Discovers Gaps and Balances

Youngteak Park (Professor at Kyonggi University, Art Critic)

​

A good work of art evokes something that resonates with the human soul. It's hard to articulate exactly what that is. It’s challenging to recreate that experience with pre-existing language and writing. It is a dizzying experience that transcends the ordinary laws of everyday life. For those bound to routine and repetition, it suddenly arrives, turns the mind inside out, and awakens either an intense surge of feeling or an unfamiliar, ineffable impression. It is the sensation of encountering an entirely new world. Music and art offer such shocks and revelations beyond the bounds of language and text. Of course, language too can carry us outside the familiar, breaking through conventional perceptions. Yet music and art are of a different order. They strike like a lightning bolt in an instant, piercing deeply with a sharp edge. In this way, within music and art, everything may be decided in a single phrase or a single glance.

​​

MY Q draws spontaneous and improvisational lines on the canvas using a dry-brush technique. These black lines emerge thick, then fade, break, and reconnect, repeating cycles of strength and fragility. Curved and expressive, they embody the artist’s physical presence. Like human footprints, every mark records the memory of a specific movement. Each line triggers the formation of a partial, loosely defined space where color is applied in relatively thin, transparent layers. Soft, languid pastel tones settle closely into these spaces. Their uneven finishes reveal a diversity of states and expressions. On the rectangular canvas, colors and brushstrokes intertwine with thin, dark lines that cut through space, creating gaps, suggesting boundaries, or balancing hues against one another. MY Q describes this as the “moment of discovering a gap and balance.” He repeatedly reveals such gaps, then fills and empties them, allowing form to emerge through contrast. The dry-brush lines are complemented by color fields rendered in gentle, dreamy tones with relaxed strokes, scattered across the canvas to claim their own domains. These amorphous color zones overlap, push, and permeate one another, generating harmony while preserving fluidity. A wide variety of lines, colors, and brushstrokes convey shifting emotions, almost like visual equivalents of onomatopoeia in comics. The resulting spaces, though not rigidly defined, pulse with a dynamic sense of movement. The paintings seem entrusted to the flow of time, drifting, rushing, and pausing in turn. Most compositions begin from the edges, moving inward, upward, and downward, as if conscious of their confinement within the rectangular frame. Colors partially filling the surface spread evenly yet create the illusion of drifting toward the corners, making the work appear in motion. Like sound carried through air, the paints and brushstrokes ripple across the canvas.
 

In abstract painting, brushwork and color are decisive. It is not simply a matter of drawing lines or applying pigments. Rather, it is the distinctive methodology and sensibility embedded within those gestures that sustain the work. Without this, the painting falters. In truth, this element is almost everything in abstraction.

​

MY Q’s paintings are all abstract. They are abstract in the sense that no concrete images refer to the external world, as they are composed solely of colors, brushstrokes, and lines. Yet unlike postwar abstraction, which erased every trace of reference and reduced painting purely to its material foundation, his works retain elements that resonate with something beyond themselves. All of his paintings carry suggestive and metaphorical titles. While many abstract works are left untitled, his titles point toward a sensibility meant to stir the viewer. Whether intentional or arising from instinct and the unconscious, his works offer visual traces that reach deeply, much like music.
In the early twentieth century, Kandinsky sought a path for painting to become like music. The immaterial nature of music, which conveys emotion and sentiment without specific objects, opened a way to break from the long tradition of painting as representation. For MY Q, who has long worked as a musician, this influence of music seems to be a defining characteristic of his art. In an impressive way, his painting evokes scenes where unintended colors and textures alongside the rhythm, flow, movement, and harmony of brushstrokes unfold one after another like sounds. It’s a painting that is intimately intertwined with music in that way. Just as immaterial sound stirs the human soul, this non-representational painting seeks to convey emotions only through brushstrokes and colors.

​

MY Q does not set a theme in advance but immerses himself in the act of filling a relatively large canvas. He begins a piece by allowing something vague to surface in his mind. When facing the canvas, he feels lost, yet an image suddenly appears, or he senses something he wishes to exist. At that moment, a faint meaning reveals itself, and the painting begins. He explains that rather than trying to paint well, he thinks about how to convey the raw emotions of human existence. In other words, his work is not a figuration of something concrete but a visual expression of raw emotion. George Condo once said, “Expressing what is in my mind is what my painting is,” and perhaps this holds true for every artist. MY Q, too, seeks to communicate his complex emotions and inner flow, though they remain unclear and without definite form, yet he continues to strive to give them presence through painting.

MY Q pushes forward with his body, employing paint and brushstrokes, so that his paintings emerge directly from physical movement. The artist’s actions themselves become the work, a fact that remains central in contemporary painting and recalls the legacy of Abstract Expressionism. Each finished piece is a record of his gestures and emotions inscribed over time within the limits of the canvas, and this quality still holds significance in MY Q’s practice. Painting, for him, is less a matter of theory than of bodily knowing. Everything that happens through the body becomes painting, and to see a painting is also to grasp it bodily. His works embody the complex emotions and conscious or unconscious flow of time he has lived, as well as the entirety of his actions. What we encounter are those very traces.