Among the people who moved along the gallery’s path as if on a slow stroll, lingering in front of a painting for 10 seconds at most, the man’s behavior couldn’t help but stand out.
It was the first moment I had ever encountered in person the meaning of a painting not as a means of expressing myself, but as something for the viewer to interpret, feel, and accept as they wished.
The initial shame faded away. What hung there was no longer my disgrace.
It was a light-hearted joke for all the visitors here, including the man with the long hair; a bland part of daily life that they passed by like a streetlight or a shop window; or perhaps, it was their own disgrace that they were gazing upon.
The man finally, slowly, began to walk away.
The man, who took a few steps away from the painting before looking back again, was indeed more handsome than average. His eyes met mine as I stood leaning against the wall, and I offered a slight smile as my English teacher had taught me, but the man ignored my greeting and left the exhibition hall, his expression still rigid.
It was not the joyful face of someone who had discovered a painting they liked. A premonition that his long stare at my painting was likely not for a positive reason made me feel a little sorry, but the works hanging there were already entities that existed beyond my hands. Even if they made someone’s face harden, there was nothing I could do about it now.
I stood there for about 30 minutes, leaning against the wall and observing the visitors. As I watched the various reactions of the people viewing my paintings, I felt, strangely, an urge to draw something being stimulated.
The desire to draw, which had always started from within me, was now eliciting a response from a different direction.
I wanted to expose myself more fully to that interesting, unfamiliar sensation, but it was time to move on to keep to my schedule.
Before leaving the exhibition hall, I looked back again, just as that man had done a moment ago. At the paintings that had come from within me and were once a part of me, but which now existed independently, being given new meaning by others, changing form according to their perspectives, living and breathing.
The couple that had passed by me when I was sitting on the bench earlier had stopped in front of ‘Isolation’ and were talking with serious faces. I watched them for a little longer, then left the exhibition hall with no lingering attachment.
The second floor was still as boisterous as if a party were underway, but thankfully, I was able to give my congratulations to Shu Shu in person. Despite being busy, he stepped away for a moment to see me off at the gallery entrance.
“I try not to, in case you complain that I’m being overprotective, but… it’s an unfamiliar city and it’s raining, so how about you just take a car.”
Holding an umbrella wide enough for two people to share without much trouble, he tilted it more toward my side, a worried look on his face.
But before I met him, I had been living just fine, accepting as a part of life the hassle of taking a bus with an umbrella on a rainy day and the discomfort of socks soaked with water seeping into my sneakers. In fact, the rain had since become much lighter, now just a fine, scattering drizzle.
I couldn’t help but laugh at his face, which looked as if he’d just heard me say I was going to jump into a fire naked.
“I’m just going to visit the two galleries I couldn’t go to yesterday and then head straight back to the hotel. I’ll message you right away every time I move. You know I don’t do anything to make you worry.”
Taking his hand from his pants pocket, he adjusted the collar of the jacket I was wearing and let out a soft sigh. His breath touched my forehead.
“Mostly, you don’t. It’s just that you sometimes do unexpected things that make a person’s heart drop.”
Had I? I didn’t think I had ever done anything to cause worry. When I looked up at him with a puzzled face, he smiled as if in defeat and handed me the umbrella.
After half-forcibly sending him back inside as he continued to list off very common-sense warnings, still unable to relax his expression, I began to walk down the rainy street.
It took more than four hours to slowly look around the two galleries I hadn’t been able to visit yesterday due to spending longer than planned at the Art Institute of Chicago, and then to walk back to the hotel. My legs were heavy by the end, as I had been on my feet the entire time, except for a 15-minute break for coffee and a muffin at a café near one of the galleries.
In the elevator heading up to the hotel room, I had to grab the bar and lean my body against the corner. The thought that it had been quite a while since I’d felt this kind of physical fatigue made me smile foolishly at my reflection in the gleaming elevator doors.
It felt like a distant memory that, until just a few months ago, my daily routine had been moving boxes and drenching my t-shirt in sweat. Moreover, I was now in Chicago, a city I had never even thought of visiting.
My body was tired, but my mind was racing, full of images I wanted to draw. His words, that experience is an asset to a creator, were right. From the morning when I faced my own painting in the gallery, until I returned to the hotel, everything I saw, heard, and sensed was a stimulus, like a needle pricking the skin of my senses, causing vivid red droplets of blood to form.
They were still scattered, individual images that had not yet coalesced into a single concept, but I wanted to capture them before they dulled.
As soon as I arrived in the room, I took off only my jacket and immediately started sketching. I recorded the images I wanted in simple croquis sketches over several pages. I added short notes where necessary.
Since I didn’t have much time, I focused and finished four or five pages of sketches, then hurriedly took off my clothes and headed for the bathroom. When I came out after my shower, he was in my room.
He had been standing at the table by the window, looking down at my drawing notebook, and he lifted his head to look at me.
“When did you get here?”
Without any conscious effort, the muscles in my face relaxed as soon as I saw him, and a smile threatened to break free. Biting my lower lip, I deliberately slowed my quickening steps as I approached him. His eyes swiftly swept over my entire body in a brief moment. It felt as if his fervent, hungry gaze was wrapping itself tautly around my freshly showered body, like a caress.
“Ah… sorry. It was open, so I took a little look.”
He apologized, suppressing the desire his eyes conveyed.
“It’s okay.”
I smiled and shook my head at him as he put down the page he was holding with an apologetic look. He gently wrapped an arm around my waist, rubbing my wet hair between his fingers. My saying it was okay for him to look at the drawings seemed to have pleased him.
Wanting to smell more of his scent—deep and intense, yet never vulgar, with a profound, sinking weight—I cautiously buried my nose in the shoulder of his jacket. ‘That scent’ was barely there, but I liked all the colognes he used and every combination of their scents.
“The event went well, I trust?”
“Mm, the event itself went well, but…”
I looked up at his face as his words trailed off. Narrowing his eyes, he tucked my wet hair behind my ear and said.
“Shu Shu was very unhappy when I suggested you come to the lunch meeting tomorrow…. It’s not like it’s all about business or anything; you can still build friendships with people. He’s gotten better than before, but he’s still so stubbornly withdrawn.”
He seemed to realize he was rambling on about something I didn’t need to know and fell silent. Then he checked his watch, his expression changing as he offered a gentle smile.
“I want to take another shower before we go out. Will you wait while I get ready?”
“I will.”
After he returned to his room, I dried my hair first. I wasn’t intentionally growing it out, but since I had only gotten it trimmed when we went for a haircut together before coming to Chicago, its length was awkward, looking a bit messy if I didn’t tuck it behind my ears.
I didn’t know how to style it with gel or wax, so I figured I should probably get it cut short when I returned to Seoul. Just as I untied the knot of my robe to change, the doorbell rang. It seemed my Noona had finished getting ready a little earlier than planned and had come up ahead of time. Tying the belt around my waist again, I headed for the door.
“Who is it?”
“…Is Mr. Liu Weikun here?”
“……”
The voice from outside the door, which came after a brief pause, was not my Noona’s.
Checking the hallway through the peephole, I saw a man pacing in front of the door. He didn’t look like hotel staff, but since he had come looking for him by name, I couldn’t just ignore him.
As soon as I grabbed the handle of the left door and pulled it open, I recognized the visitor at a glance. It was the man who had stood for a long time in front of ‘Isolation’ at the gallery that morning.
My eyes widened on their own at the strange coincidence, but he didn’t seem to recognize me at all. The man, who had an air of impatience about him, narrowed his brow and stared intently at my face.
“Are you perhaps Korean?”
When I said yes, his suspicious gaze swept over me in my bathrobe. The man made no attempt to hide his intention of figuring out who I was.
“Where’s the owner of this room? Are you allowed to just open the door like that? He’s going to be really mad.”
His tone suggested that he, the visitor, knew him better than I, the one opening the door from inside the room.
“He’s… in the shower right now.”
At my answer, the man shrugged and clicked his tongue as if in disbelief. Judging by his mumble, “Nice work for the middle of the day,” the man probably assumed that he and I had been tangled up in sex just moments before. Furthermore, he seemed to have concluded that I was some kind of sexual partner he had brought to his room.
“I’ll just go in and wait. That’s okay, right?”
It sounded like he was asking for permission, but the man didn’t wait for an answer and stepped inside. But as the man had said, I didn’t have the right to let just anyone into the room. I subtly blocked his path and put on a troubled expression.
“First, if you could tell me who I should say is here…”
The corner of the man’s mouth twisted as he glanced at me from the side. He seemed to have no intention of hiding or softening any of his feelings toward me.
“Is Baek Yuni here already?”
It was his voice.
Pulling down the towel he had on his head, he looked out from the master bedroom into the entrance hall and slowly walked out. It was difficult to read what he felt upon seeing the man from his blank face and gaze.
“What is it?”
The man shook his head and laughed at his reaction.
“Is that what you say after not seeing me for years?”
“I said, ‘what is it?’”
Walking barefoot to the front of the entrance, he pulled my arm to make me step back behind him. Seeing his confrontational attitude, as if he were cornering the man, it seemed he was not a welcome guest, at the very least.
The man glanced back and forth between him and me, both of us in bathrobes, then looked straight at him as if none of that mattered and said.
“I came because I have something to say.”
“Were we ever the kind of people where I have to carve out my precious time to listen just because you show up like this saying you have something to say?”
“Shu Shu’s work is selling well. Today’s the opening, but almost everything has a sold-out sticker on it. You’re staying at the same hotel, right?”
“So what. Are you trying to threaten me or something?”
The man scoffed and let his gaze fall to the side. Then he tapped the tiled floor of the hall with a long, plastic-covered umbrella.
“Hyung, you’re really something else. I was genuinely surprised. You found the artist of ‘Isolation’ after all, didn’t you?”
“……”
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