“We can’t just keep standing here… I’m not much of a talker, so… I don’t have much in the way of good things to say. If you’d like, would you care to take a slow look around my studio?”
Clapping her hands together as if in applause, Mrs.Kim drew my attention. At the unexpected suggestion, I found my eyes searching for him. She gave me a nod, as if to say it was all right.
“…It would be an honor.”
“It’s hardly an honor.”
Mrs.Kim laughed, patting my shoulder.
Leaving him behind in the hall, which was unadorned by even a single potted plant or painting, Mrs.Kim and I headed down the corridor from which he and Mrs.Kim had appeared moments before. My heart was numb with tension and trepidation, but Mrs.Kim revealed his studio without a hint of hesitation, as if opening the front door for a friend who’d come to visit after a long time.
The studio, like the hall, was entirely white, but as befitting a space for painting, traces of use and ink were naturally left here and there.
I didn’t know much about the history of art or the genealogies of painters, but the same was not true for Mrs.Kim.
Having gone through various artistic styles during her long career, Mrs.Kim had been immersing himself in traditional East Asian painting using only ink for the past three years. Thanks to this, a heavy scent of ink hung in the studio.
It was hard for me to guess what it meant for a professional painter, a recognized master at that, to open up their studio. But I still remembered the sense of isolation that my parents’ shared studio had evoked in me as a child.
That space, where my mother drew comics and my father painted in oils, felt like a secret domain that only the two of them could share and understand each other in.
In the living room or at the dining table, my parents were there as my parents, and I could feel very close to them, but the moment they stepped into their studio, the feeling of being excluded from them had made my younger self anxious.
That place was a space entirely their own, and it was more than just a space.
Of course, the meaning of a studio differs for every artist, but for painters who pour themselves into their work, it must be, at the very least, a space where they confront themselves. The very fact that I had stepped into such a private room of Mrs.Kim’s, so intimate that the word “private” felt insufficient, was already special.
The geographical sense of being in Hong Kong also became meaningless. Come to think of it, the clamorous noise from the streets was also completely blocked out.
“Not much to see, is there? I don’t use a wide variety of materials, so… well… this is just how I work.”
Coffee, is that okay? —I expressed my thanks to Mrs.Kim, who asked this as he handed me a mug, and took the cup.
“Should I have given you iced? At this temperature, drinking iced coffee lowers your body temperature, so I always drink it hot.”
“No, this is fine. Thank you.”
I drank the coffee. The scent of coffee mingled with the scent of ink in the room, where a ceiling air conditioner was running on low. Sipping the coffee, I carefully continued to look around the room.
Perhaps she stored his finished works in another room, for the only paintings in this one were a large landscape that appeared to be a work in progress and a portrait hanging on the opposite wall.
Even if a dragon coiled itself around Mount Tai and hid its head, it was still a dragon.
Despite being unfinished, Mrs.Kim’s landscape painting was overwhelming. The bold spirit that only a master who has spoken of himself through painting her entire life could melt into her work without ostentation or bluff, and at the same time, a generous tolerance that seemed to embrace the world, were so alive that I had gotten goosebumps all over my body the moment I entered the room.
But strangely, what drew my heart more at that moment was the painting above the sofa on the opposite side.
The portrait, painted like a watercolor using colored ink, was so innocent it looked as if a child had drawn it, the boundaries between the lines blurred and indistinct. But it was clearly Mrs.Kim’s work.
“Do you like it?”
As if sensing my gaze, Mrs.Kim turned around, looked at the painting, and asked. Gripping the mug with both hands and feeling the warmth of the coffee, I nodded.
“I thought I knew almost all of your works… I’ve never seen this one before.”
My lips trembled slightly as I answered.
Placing her mug on the table in front of the sofa, Mrs.Kim took the painting off the wall. It was about the size of an octavo sheet. Not very large.
“Take this painting.”
“……”
I was too stunned to react. I could only stare at Mrs.Kim with wide eyes.
“Ah, no. Really, no. I can’t possibly.”
My senses belatedly returned, and I too placed my mug on the table and waved my hands in refusal. I couldn’t help but think of the monetary value of Mrs.Kim’s work. I didn’t want to put it this way, but… I couldn’t accept such an expensive gift.
Mrs.Kim walked over to a shelf by the window with the painting and said.
“You’re not good with words either, are you, Yeehyeon?”
“……”
My feet, which had been about to follow him, stopped at that question. Mrs.Kim wasn’t talking about what people commonly call conversational skills or sociability. She was talking about what my most comfortable language was, something a person who had just met me couldn’t possibly know.
“Me neither. So think of this as a letter or a card from me to you, and accept it.”
My open mouth just moved, forming no words.
“I can’t…”
I muttered, my arms hanging limp. Now that I wasn’t painting, I felt even less deserving of that work.
She placed the painting on the shelf and turned to face me.
“That painting.”
“……”
“To A-wei, ‘Isolation’ was a comfort.”
“……”
Once, at the fact that Mrs.Kim remembered ‘Isolation’.
And again, at the fact that the painting’s meaning to him was comfort.
Mrs. Kim’s short sentence made me stagger.
Did you like that painting, ‘Isolation’? I had asked him ‘that night.’
“Shall I make you forget everything?” he had said, climbing onto the bed. That was his answer.
I hadn’t refused him, and at the end of a pleasure that felt like my hazy, melted mind was being stirred, I was able, as he’d said, to forget everything and sink into a deep sleep.
If that deep rest was the answer he had intended to give me, I could probably take it to mean he liked the painting. But that was, at best, my own speculation.
I never imagined I would hear a precise verbal answer here, through Mrs.Kim.
“A-wei grew up seeing many great works, and as a gallery owner and a private collector, he owns many valuable pieces, but the work that has shaken him the most to this day is probably ‘Isolation’.”
Leaning against the shelf behind him, Mrs.Kim crossed her arms as if to hug herself.
“When ‘Isolation’ was released to the world as the cover of a famous author’s Hong Kong edition novel, he was so possessive that he wished the painting existed only for him… to the point that he was constantly displeased with the fact that he had to share it with others, even in that way.”
They were unbelievable stories. For me, who had to endure considerable tension just by meeting Mrs. Kim… they were stories beyond what I could handle. But I couldn’t stop listening.
“You, Yeehyeon, appealed to the world with your emotions, and people who use the same language understood and responded to it. A-wei isn’t a painter, but he is more sensitive to the language in paintings than anyone. That’s probably why he’s working at the gallery now. Though sometimes he pretends he only looks at paintings based on their economic value.”
At that, Mrs.Kim let out a soft laugh. That relaxed laugh somehow overlapped with his.
Mrs. Kim’s gaze, which had been directed diagonally at the floor, turned to me again.
“Your painting, Yeehyeon, functioned as an intelligible language for at least one person. It gave him a kind of empathy… that he wasn’t the only one who felt alienated for an unconventional reason… something that no one, not family… not even his parents could give him…”
Empathy for ‘Isolation’.
That was the emotion I had felt from Suki Kim’s critique.
Under two people who were a couple in a good relationship and understanding parents, I had to be a perfectly happy child. Many people around me, even my friends, often spoke as if it were my duty.
It’s not that I didn’t love my parents. On the contrary, they were more precious than anything, I loved them, and for me, who wasn’t a very extroverted person, they were like my best friends until the accident happened.
I was happy. But it wasn’t the perfect happiness that people forced on me. I don’t know if perfect happiness even exists, or what form it would take if it did.
For my mother, my father was her first priority, and for my father, my mother was his. They needed each other to live as themselves. Sometimes, I was just envious of friends who had parents who lived for their children. Sometimes.
Between my parents, there was a bond that I could never squeeze into. And that was probably… the most important element in their lives. They were people who spoke the same language, and in the world, there were only two people who spoke that language.
No one understands the sense of isolation felt for such… unconventional reasons. So I painted it.
The fact that someone other than Mrs.Kim had shared the same feeling through that painting… and that it was none other than him, Liu Wei-kun, suddenly felt like the final destination that had been waiting at the end of the entire journey.
For reasons I couldn’t quite explain, a hot dampness welled up behind my eyes. I didn’t know. For now, I could only say it was for a reason I didn’t know. I clenched my limp hands into fists, holding back the tears. Expressing emotion isn’t necessarily a weakness, but I didn’t want to be sentimental in this moment.
Mrs. Kim uncrossed her arms, pushed herself off the shelf, and came to stand before me. Then, placing both hands on my shoulders, she smiled and looked deeply into my face.
“Accept it as an expression of gratitude for that.”
Could Mrs. Kim be his mother?
The atmosphere between them had given rise to a slight suspicion, and as I listened to Mrs. Kim’s story, that suspicion had grown closer to certainty. It didn’t seem likely that a stranger, not family or a parent, would know about his sense of alienation that even his family or parents couldn’t fully empathize with. He wasn’t the type to share his solitude with others.
Like a teacher from my childhood, Mrs.Kim gently cupped my cheek once before letting go, then returned to the shelf and began to wrap the painting.
“A very long time ago… I thought there was something more important than painting, and that for its sake, I had to give up painting for a while. I let go of it for about two years. Since I wasn’t painting, I naturally fell into a slump. This is a painting I did at the end of that slump, and it’s like a diary entry I never intended to show the world.”
Mrs.Kim’s hands, wrapping the painting in paper with a texture similar to hanji and tying it with string, slowed for a moment. Then she looked up at the window, which framed the Hong Kong scenery like a long, horizontal picture frame along the wall.
“I thought something inside me had died, and that’s why I couldn’t paint anymore… but one day, it occurred to me… that maybe I was the one who was dead because I was no longer painting.”
Tying the string in a tight knot, Mrs. Kim stood before me again with the painting. She smiled as she handed it to me.
“That I can’t be myself without going through painting… that’s probably what it means.”
She apologized for not being able to give me more time, but it was hard to believe we had shared only about thirty minutes. The experience of what I saw, heard, and felt in that time had already far exceeded and overflowed what I had expected and prepared for.
After exchanging goodbyes with Mrs. Kim with a brief hug, I went down the stairs and back out onto the noisy street, feeling dazed as if I had passed through a boundary separating dimensions. My senses couldn’t keep up with the speed of the experience. It was a state similar to when I had woken up in his bed after hyperventilating.
“Are you okay?”
At his voice, I slowly raised my head. There were eyes looking down at me with concern from a place slightly higher than me. The fact that he was looking at me with concern felt new.
No, it wasn’t new at all.
He was the one who had taken care of me in a moment I couldn’t even remember, when I was hyperventilating and couldn’t get a grip on myself. When I finally calmed down and came out of his bedroom into the living room, the painting was already gone. He had deliberately removed it, thinking it might be the cause of my fit. The painting that, according to Mrs.Kim, he had cherished to the point of… obsession.
I had already known for a while that the initial hostile wariness he showed wasn’t his consistent and stubborn attitude toward others. There were times he treated even the members of Phantom or Inwoo-hyung coldly, but that wasn’t all of him either.
How had I clung to him? How had he… soothed, managed, and changed the clothes of someone who was clinging to him desperately, suffering as if they were dying even though they knew they wouldn’t, and laid them in bed?
What was his alienation? What kind of alienation had made him empathize with ‘Isolation’?
I thought I would only be thinking of Mrs. Kim after meeting her, but unexpectedly, my thoughts were only of him.
“You seem to have used up a lot of energy… If you want to rest, I’ll take you to the hotel.”
It was just as he said. I hadn’t gotten into a physical fight with Mrs.Kim, but I felt limp, as if all the moisture had been drained from my body.
But, why? I didn’t want to be apart from him.
There was a sense of listlessness, but a rising excitement coexisted with it. It was obvious I wouldn’t be able to fall asleep easily even if I went back to the hotel. I met his eyes and shook my head.
Why? Something like bewilderment flickered in his eyes as he looked at me. It wasn’t the kind of bewilderment that meant he was troubled by me not going back to the hotel, or that he wished I would. It was the look of someone losing control and revealing their emotions, just like when he had crumpled the business card he’d snatched from me. But it didn’t last long.
“Alright, then. Get in the car.”
He didn’t try to persuade me further.
As if letting himself crumble for a moment, he hastily averted his gaze and brushed past me. Then, holding the rear door open, he urged me with his eyes to get in quickly. Following the scent that rose from his shoulder, I got into the car.
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