He, who had been staring at me as I smoked as if observing something fascinating, chuckled and turned his head. Then, handling the cigarette as skillfully as if it were a part of his own body, he drew in the smoke.
“That’s right. I hate the jealousy that says everything is thanks to your parents, but I hate the flattery just as much, so I don’t reveal it.”
Even though his mother was of Korean descent, he was from Hong Kong, and it didn’t seem like any of his close family had settled in Korea. Still, I thought I could vaguely understand why he had started a gallery in Seoul, a place where he had no connections, linking it to the stories he had told me earlier.
“Everything that has constituted me from birth until now has already been a benefit of my background, so to say now that I’ll decline the benefits of influence… it’s just childish stubbornness, so honestly, I’m embarrassed to even talk about this.”
Speaking half to himself, he gave a self-deprecating smile, put the filter to his lips, and drew in the smoke.
“Because they’ll obviously whisper that it’s a shallow show put on by a prince who wanted the title of a self-made man. Even if that’s true to some extent, it’s by no means the whole story… and I’m tired of being sacrificed to people who love to pass judgment on others’ lives.”
Having said that much, he seemed to have revealed more of his inner thoughts than he’d planned. He wore a slightly chagrined expression and quickly drew on his cigarette as if to seal his lips.
It’s not shameful to try to fight against the inertia of the orbit that maintains your present self. Because even to shift just a little from your original place, to create or change even a single habit, requires an all-out effort. Therefore, any intention to conduct a new experiment through oneself should not be treated lightly.
Countless words floated through my mind, but I couldn’t bring any of them out of my mouth.
Would it seem like superficial empathy? Coming from a coward like me, who had never made any effort to break free from inertia, would such words even feel sincere?
Even if it was a good intention based on admiration and envy for someone who was accomplishing what I could not, I realized I had a considerable fear of making pronouncements about another person’s life.
“Ah, about my mother, the kids don’t know. Director Han knows, though.”
He added this as if it had just occurred to him, in a light tone, but to me, it was a rather surprising statement.
Perhaps it had just turned out that way, and he hadn’t intended to keep it a secret from his Noona and Hyung. He wasn’t the type to blab about himself unprompted. He didn’t ask me to keep it quiet, either. But his face, smiling at me, was conveying the message to keep it a secret.
I didn’t feel a sense of superiority from the fact that he had confided in me something he hadn’t even told Noona and Hyung.
When he had offered me the decisive card of Suki Kim to persuade me to paint, he had probably been prepared for the fact that I would find out about their mother-son relationship.
Considering his struggle to be just Liu Wai-Kun, apart from his origins and background, it felt like an unconventional choice. That was why I found it surprising.
The fact that he had tried to make me hold a brush, even at the risk of revealing a part of himself he didn’t want to show.
Not just because of a business mindset of discovering an artist as a dealer or collector, but because he himself was the person who had painted the picture he had kept by his side for a long time, resonating with it and being comforted by it.
He knew, he was certain, that if I didn’t paint, I would lose my individuality and just drift like colorless dust buried in universality. As if he had known me from up close for a very long time.
As if mesmerized, I slowly brought the cigarette, which I had only held between my fingers after the first drag, to my lips.
He, who had been leaning back loosely with his hands on the mattress behind him, looked at me and brought his cigarette to his lips at the same time. We were each smoking our own cigarettes, but perhaps because of his gaze or the atmosphere, I had the illusion of feeling his lips and tongue through the cigarette. My skin tingled with a piquant sweetness, as if I were physically communing with him.
A fragrance drifts. Not with the kind of intensity that suffocated the breath like during sex, but with a subtle languor.
Exhaling a long stream of smoke with a slow breath, he spoke quietly.
“You said it before, in front of Shushu’s work. That it made you want to paint.”
I had certainly said that. But at the time, he seemed almost completely uninterested in me, so I didn’t think he would remember that conversation after so much time had passed.
“……”
“Paint.”
It was the concise core. Stripping away all grandiose reasoning and persuasion, the final kernel he wanted to convey to me was that.
“I don’t know what made you unable to paint anymore, Seo Yeehyeon… but for someone like you… the only way to walk, run, and breathe again is to paint, so fight for your life… just think about getting your language back.”
Like last time when he told me to eat for my own sake even if I had no appetite, his words to paint as if my life depended on it captured my heart like an impressive passage from a song.
The more I got to know him, the more he seemed like someone trying to make me pick up a brush not for his business or for ‘Phantom,’ but for my own sake. His words, his earnest, burning eyes as he looked at me, said as much.
Suki Kim’s comment that he pretended to see paintings only for their economic value was, in other words, a testament to the fact that he was someone who could never weigh paintings by their economic value alone; someone who couldn’t help but seriously engage with the uniqueness of each artist who tells their story through their work, and the works they create, with his outstanding artistic sensibility.
He thought it was difficult for a work to be fully recognized on its own merit without marketing, and he unhesitatingly joined hands with even the most worldly of media to promote artists and their works, but that wasn’t the entirety of his attitude toward paintings and artists.
It might be me being overly defensive of him, but it even felt as if he were trying to suppress his pure affection for painting with that kind of business-like attitude.
Though I had only taken two puffs, I tapped the already long ash into the ashtray and mustered the courage to ask him.
“That I’m a person who speaks through painting… how can you be so sure with just one work?”
He, who had been staring at me, averted his gaze and repeatedly swept his hair back. The faint smile that appeared on his face was almost shy, endearingly so.
Looking down at the cigarette in his hand, which had already burned down to a stub, he said.
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there are almost no paintings hanging in this house. But I’ve kept ‘Isolation’ hanging in my home since before I came to Seoul. I’ve lived with it like that, looking at that painting every day, for five years. Not just the theme or composition, but the brushstrokes and texture… If it were a movie, I’d memorized all the characters’ lines. I probably know more about that painting now than you do, Seo Yeehyeon.”
I felt a heat rise from inside my body, my face flushing.
When I had read his review of the artist Shushu, the high praise for Shushu’s capabilities as an artist and the stories of the personal influence Shushu’s work had on him… I had felt it was like a passionate confession, but this, this was even more…
Suddenly, he tilted his head and looked back at me, and I, in turn, dropped my gaze to avoid his. The cigarette came into my view, and as if seeking refuge, I brought it to my lips and took a drag.
“So there’s no way I wouldn’t know that the artist of ‘Isolation’ is someone who has to paint to live.”
But I couldn’t resist the curiosity about his expression as he spoke about me and my painting. When I raised my head, exhaling smoke, his eyes held a different kind of heat than the one seen during sex.
A seriousness stripped of all bravado and lies, of probing and self-protection; a frankness that revealed his entire inner self, making it impossible to laugh off.
“I’m not a person who speaks through painting, but I was born to someone who couldn’t live without painting. Genes? You can’t ignore them.”
He smiled as he joked, but I couldn’t even force the corners of my lips to lift.
「I thought something inside my heart 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 no longer painted.」
His words to paint as if my life depended on it resonated with what Suki Kim had said. As he said, the power of genes was indeed impossible to ignore.
I clearly remembered, as if I had recorded it and listened to it every day, what Ms. Han had said about a time when she had set her painting aside for about two years, having prioritized things and decided she had to temporarily give up painting for something more important.
I suspected that those two years might have been related to the process of having to get a divorce to protect him, but that was only speculation.
Just as I couldn’t talk about why I had stopped painting, I couldn’t ask what his weakest point was.
He, who had been staring at me as I smoked, reached out as soon as the cigarette left my lips and traced their surface. The lips that were swollen and sensitive from his deep kisses.
Slowly, in the faint light, his irises, which looked paler than usual, meticulously traced my face. He had a way of looking at me like this sometimes. From the perspective of someone who was fond of him, it was a difficult gaze to receive comfortably. If it was a habit, it seemed like a good one to fix. Especially if he didn’t want to get caught up in a lover’s quarrel due to some unnecessary misunderstanding.
“Did it hurt?”
“……”
Since he was touching my lips, it was unclear whether the question was about my lips, or about my insides where the knotting had occurred, or about the sex as a whole. But whatever the question was about, the answer I would give back was the same anyway. I shook my head.
Even after pulling his hand away, having gently tugged my lower lip down as if to flip it, he gazed at me for a long time. It was like a ritual, committing to memory a face one wants to remember before a long journey.
His gaze and expression were calmer than when he was talking, but I felt a tremor from the rippling waves of the atmosphere emanating from him.
Vaguely, I felt an impulse to confess everything to him. If I could hear about him by confessing about myself, it felt like a profitable transaction.
Had I ever wanted to know someone this much? And about the most private and cruel wounds, trapped in the most intimate and dark places of the other person.
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