Moment of Memory
Memory always keeps a vague vigil over us. Certain emotions, expressions, and places that undeniably existed gradually fade in the flow of time, their void being filled by imagination, distortion, and the afterimages in our minds. Artist Jeon Min-su's painting begins right in that gap—at the boundary between memory and imagination, reality and illusion.
The artist's canvas features a family. However, this family is different from the image of the harmonious and clear 'family portrait' we are familiar with. Standing in front of a chromakey background, the family looks like a photograph from a trip, but they are, in fact, beings who have arrived nowhere. The blue background grants the illusion of being able to go anywhere, yet it only evokes places never reached and the past time that cannot be retrieved. The father still stands authoritatively before the camera, but the family, beyond his gaze, is exhausted, enduring the moment without being able to say something.
The scenes in this body of work sometimes summon up the landscape of silent journeys. A bus parked on the roadside in a time when there weren't even rest stops, hazy faces reflected in the window, family members not looking at each other. For the artist, this silent journey is a 'montage of memory,' where it is indistinguishable whether it is his real family or ghosts from his past. Jeon Min-su's painting, through these fragments of personal recollection, draws out a universal emotional landscape that all of us might have experienced.
The artist's world also contains the quiet refuge of childhood. The image of a child huddled in a small space made of comic books shows how warm and safe, yet simultaneously isolated and lonely, the paper world of imagination can be. It is a space as tranquil as a mother's womb, but also one of enclosure, disconnected from the world. The child hides. When we cannot endure the complexities of reality, we often seek out our own gaps, much like our childhood selves. The artist meticulously observes and expresses that gap.
These works are not a mere reproduction of the past. They are 'reconstructed memories.' The father and children smiling before the camera, siblings laughing while wearing face packs, shadow-like faces reflected in a glass window. Each scene is distorted, fragmented, and hazily reorganized, as if an old photo was scanned but shaken. Like the family's faces disintegrating on an old television monitor, our memories are always fragmented and edited, and some emotions can never be fully articulated.
Therefore, his works do not simply present the artist's family history. They are about the 'trivial yet indelible scenes' that all of us harbor. "Nothing happened that day." This single sentence the artist summons ultimately points to the day when the most things happened. An ordinary day with no words and no major events. But looking back, all the seeds of emotion were already planted within it. Hurt and collapse, departure and alienation begin quietly in this manner.
The figures in Jeon Min-su's paintings are often leaving somewhere. A child celebrating their first birthday under the Big Dipper, the "me" in a color photo with a mother blurred to black and white, a mother's portrait overlaid with colorful particles on her face. They all fill the canvas like beings who can no longer be seen or met again. Like the phrase, "The dream of leaving far away. And summer," the artist's memory is revived through images of seasons and emotions. It is water flowing across the time gap, and a question that remains unanswered beneath a hazy sky.
The photographs of the artist's maternal grandfather and aunts particularly instill a strong sense of unfamiliarity. The skin color, as if from an alien world, and the formalized posture, as if staged, remind us of how alien a sensation the time called "the past" is to us. Family is intimate, but simultaneously alien. The faces are familiar, but the lives are strange. The surrounding emotions—suspicion and distance, like a cat—are also central to how the artist engages with memory.
The artist's Moment of Memory depicts scenes preserved in photographs, the emotions hidden behind those scenes, and the distortions created by time. It is not mere nostalgia for the past, but the restoration of memory that is constantly 'brought back to life in the present.' The emotions of childhood are always earnest, strange, and oddly amusing. The artist reconstructs that earnest and strange world like a play or a scene from a film.
The artist asks: Was the family we remember truly real? Or were they merely illusions that existed only in the way we wished to remember them? However, the artist does not impose these questions through his paintings. He merely, quietly and gently, brings forth one scene after another. In other words, this is a single cut of memory, an album of emotions, and a story that is still ongoing.
Thus, the 'Moment of Memory' depicted by the artist becomes a moment for all of us. The scene that began with a single photograph eventually enters our hearts and is quietly played back.
Written by Lim Dae-sik
