I opened my eyes to an unfamiliar place.
It wasn’t the room I was using at Manager Han’s house.
I was lying in a bed, and because the pillow and the bedding covering my body were all clean and cozy, I didn’t feel threatened, despite having woken up in a strange place.
Because I had no memory of how I had gotten here or how I had fallen asleep, it took some time for my consciousness to fully function.
My body was temporarily unresponsive, like right after waking from sleep paralysis. With the strange sensation that a certain section of my memory had been erased, I wriggled my fingers and toes little by little under the feather-light duvet, plump with air.
The bed was fixed with its head against the wall, with space on either side, and to the left of the bed was a window with curtains drawn. I could assume there was a window beyond them because of the curtains.
It was raining. Perhaps because it was an excellent soundproof window, there was almost no sound of rain. It was just that the air was different. A subtle moisture hanging in the void. Perhaps, during the nearly five years I spent by the sea, I had developed such an ability.
Right, I was at the CEO’s house, helping with the photoshoot for ‘Old Future.’
It took a long while for my thoughts to reach that point.
And I realized that I was crying.
I couldn’t tell if I had been crying the whole time I was asleep, or if new tears were flowing as my memory began to function properly, connecting to the painting I had encountered in the living room, and to the sealed, malformed pains that had been dragged out through the medium of that painting.
The path the tears had traced, trickling down past my temples, ached. As I became aware of it, new tears began to flow again.
His living room. My painting was hanging above a large, minimalist sofa. It was the painting that had won the Special Jury Prize at a contest hosted by a major gallery when I was sixteen.
My mother and father had loved me without want, to the point that my friends would have been envious, and they never hoped for good grades or forced a future profession on me that they had decided in advance.
Instead, I had to decide everything for myself, and the responsibility for it was also mine. If I wanted it, my parents would offer advice, but the decision had to be mine. From choosing a topic for a performance assessment to whether I would test for an arts middle school or attend a regular one.
Unlike my friends around me, who built solidarity within their peer group with rebellion against parents or the older generation as their driving force, I had no one to rebel against. What rebellion could one mount against someone who forced nothing upon you?
I could understand the feelings of my friends who grumbled about parents who cut their allowances for poor grades or refused to buy them trendy clothes for being delinquent, but it was difficult for me to empathize deeply as someone who had experienced similar things.
To my mother and father, each other was their first priority. There was a powerful bond between them, and they deeply understood, respected, and admired each other. Their situation was different from couples whose passion for each other had long since faded, living instead on affection for their children and a sense of community.
The earth does not revolve around me, and my parents’ lives do not revolve around me. The only thing that revolves around me is my own life.
That was the bare face of life that I had naturally learned through my parents’ upbringing.
That no one else could take responsibility for the consequences of my choices, and that blaming or resenting my parents would change nothing. No matter how much my parents loved me, they couldn’t turn back time. They couldn’t take a test for me, nor could they paint a picture for me.
My choice, unable to form a perfect bond with either my peers or my parents, was painting.
Painting was my language.
Technique and color were my words.
They were my words and my grammar, which became richer and more sophisticated as the techniques and colors I could handle increased.
Because my mother and father never advised me on my paintings and only helped when I asked technical questions, my art around the time I submitted it to the contest was uninfluenced by any particular artist, style, or art world trend.
To put it nicely, it was individualistic; to put it badly, it was without foundation. Some media outlets that viewed my award negatively actually used such an expression, mentioning the crisis of modern art in which ‘authenticity’ was being threatened.
But it didn’t matter, as I hadn’t been painting with the goal of being recognized by the mainstream art world. The reason I had decided to submit to that contest, despite having rarely participated in art competitions for young people, was because it was an experimental competition that judged works solely on their own merit, regardless of age, fame, or style.
I didn’t want to win an award. Since painting was my language, I wanted to communicate with the world, with someone, in that language. I wanted to know if the language I used had the function of being able to communicate with someone.
The opposite of isolation is probably solidarity. A bond where individual entities feel comfort in each other based on similarity, feel a sense of belonging, and feel the relief of not being alone.
Once you move past that stage, the sense of solidarity can be directed toward the other, not just the self. The ultimate state that can be reached through solidarity would be one where you can give up your own life for each other, with the belief that you can understand and accept the other, become deeply connected, and finally, my business extends to your business, and your business can affect me.
The two figures in the work, clinging to each other as if in dependence, like Siamese twins, contrast with the distracting background densely filled with various geometric patterns.
As solid as the sense of stability and solidarity that binds the two central figures is, the dynamic of the background surrounding them is unstable and bizarre.
Unlike in literature, irony is not easy to express in art. By presenting two people bound by solidarity as the center of the work, the artist is, on the contrary, appealing to a sense of isolation. Considering the artist’s young age, it cannot be said to be anything but a bold choice.
The expressive style, which combines traditional painting techniques with pop art elements and a touch of cartoonish imagination, is also full of the fresh energy unique to a new artist, even if it is somewhat raw.
Unlike solitude, isolation is a concept that necessarily exists in relation to others. It is an emotion that arises when one is rejected and excluded by another. It is an emotion that cannot be felt alone. Looking at the work, one will be reminded of the admiration, jealousy, and feelings of alienation one has harbored for things that are beautiful, warm, and love each other, which everyone has experienced at least once in their life. Furthermore, one will be comforted that those ugly feelings one had concealed were not one’s own shame alone, and will be able to ‘bond’ with the artist’s ‘Isolation.’
The review of the special prize by ‘Suki Kim’ was enough.
It was astonishing. She was like a witness to the fact that my painting was a language to me. Her review was like a translation of what I had articulated through my painting into actual language.
At that moment, my world had clearly expanded by one step, from within the family to outside the family. It was the first experience where a boy, who had only craved his parents’ attention and tried to define his own worth solely through his relationship with them, realized that such communication and solidarity could be obtained in other relationships as well.
But what greeted me when I faced that painting again so suddenly was not the memory of empathy and solidarity from being understood.
The childish jealousy toward my mother and father that I had poured into that painting.
My mother’s accident, which had struck down from above and shattered everything before that first precious sensation could even properly take root.
And, my father, who had completely ‘alienated’ the world without my mother.
The terrible things that had rushed in one after another, as if they had been prepared and waiting in line at the door, had been crouching inside that painting, then sprang out and stabbed at my whole body. It was a monster with four arms, six legs, and three necks, brandishing a merciless sword.
I thought that with the passage of time, I was inevitably growing numb, even if I didn’t want to, but I was wrong.
It was a topic I couldn’t bring up comfortably even in front of Morae and Yeehan-hyung, but since I wasn’t living as if it had never happened at all, I had thought it was solidifying into a part of my life like this.
But that was only possible because I had only mentioned it at moments when I was ready, with people I was ready for, and about the parts I was ready for.
In the face of the raw, naked past I had encountered so suddenly, I was still just a fragile sixteen-year-old with no defenses.
Tears flowed. But they were mechanical tears.
They were not tears as an outpouring of emotion, gushing up from the cracks that formed as the foundation of my being shook. They were just a physical reaction, tears that brought no relief and resolved nothing, no matter how much I shed them.
Lying down, I took a deep breath and slowly exhaled. I raised my still-stiff arm to wipe away the tears and slowly sat up, looking around the room.
As if it were a space solely for sleep, the room contained only a bed, a nightstand, a one-person armchair, and a small table beside it. Instead of a pendant light hanging in the center, small indirect lights set into the ceiling’s perimeter were lit. The brightness was adjusted to be very low, but it was bright enough to distinguish everything in the room. On the nightstand was a tray with a glass bottle of water and a cup.
Just the fact that someone had thought of me waking up, left a light on, and prepared water, seemed to give me a little strength.
As I pushed back the covers and set my feet on the floor below the bed, I realized I was wearing pajamas. I unconsciously felt my chest and stomach. Had I changed into them myself and gotten into bed? No matter how I tried to squeeze out a memory, the last scene was me at the entrance to the living room, saying to him, “Because I painted it.”
My legs felt weak, so I slowly stretched my whole body to loosen up. Despite having suffered no physical blow, my bodily functions were creaking. This was not within the realm of everyday experience.
I tidied the bed, put on the indoor slippers that someone had clearly brought for my use, and cautiously left the room.
The short hallway that spread out before me was, as expected, unfamiliar. It was a place I didn’t know. When I walked to the end of the hallway, a small hall decorated with a tall bookshelf and an armchair appeared, and in front of it was a railing. Beyond the railing was empty space.
The interior was quiet. Only the faint sound of rain. I walked to the railing. I was on the second floor. From the railing, I could look down into the first-floor living room. Fortunately, this was, as I’d expected, his house. At least I hadn’t woken up in a completely unknown place with my memory wiped clean.
Unlike the bedroom where the lights had been dimmed, the living room was brightly lit. The sun seemed to have set long ago. Outside the floor-to-ceiling window, it was completely dark.
He was sitting on the sofa, drinking something. Even from a distance, he looked deep in thought. I couldn’t see Juhan-hyung or Yuni-noona. And, the painting that had been hanging above the sofa was also gone.
Could it all have been a dream? Like the things that happened to Alice in ‘Wonderland’?
Of course not.
Where my fingertips traced the railing, there was a staircase. I descended the white, floating-style stairs, which were open between the steps, and by the time I reached the entrance to the living room, he was looking this way.
What was certain was that he had been by my side during the period of my missing memory. He would know what I had said and what I had done. That made facing him at this moment all the more difficult and awkward. I felt as if he had a huge hold over me, the one person I didn’t want to show my weakest side to.
Unable to approach easily, I stood at the entrance to the living room and placed a hand on the wall. He stood up from his seat, placing the on-the-rocks glass he was holding on the table, and walked this way, opening his mouth.
“You should probably lie down some more.”
His voice was low and husky, as if he hadn’t spoken for a long time. After he finished speaking, he cleared his throat a couple of times as if to loosen it.
“Um… I’m sorry. Earlier… I forced myself to eat a hamburger when I had no appetite… I think that might have upset my stomach. I’ve been tense since yesterday, and I think I drank a little too much beer…. I’m not usually frail, so I don’t know why that happened all of a sudden…. Did I, by any chance, collapse?”
In my attempt to act fine, I ended up babbling more than usual. But I hated the idea of him thinking the cause of this incident was mental. If his forthright self started digging with questions, I had neither the courage to tell the truth nor the composure to invent a lie.
He came to a stop just a step in front of where I stood and frowned. Then he clicked his tongue.
“You’re not well, so don’t bother trying to lie.”
“……”
“I won’t ask you anything.”
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