<Indivisible 나눌 수 없는>

July 17 - July 28, 2025

Relations 2302 detail cut Acrylic gouache on canvas, 197X162.5cm, 2023

Son Won-young | Relationship Landscape, Painting of 'Between'

Son Won-young's paintings start from persistent thoughts about 'relationships'. 

To the author, 'I' is an autonomous subject and at the same time another world formed by the entanglement of numerous other pieces. Puzzle pieces that swim like a neural network are formed through interactions with others, 

This is visualized in the artist's paintings as lines and colors, layers and layers. 'Relationship' is 'me' and 'not me', and the subtle vibrations that occur in the gap between them. 

Wonyoung Son names this invisible point of connection as 'interval' and interprets it into a sensory painting using the motif of a puzzle.

His work is implemented in a layered manner. The base color is dripped 40-50 times or more to form a layered density, and then the squeezed paint is drawn on top to expand the bright light areas. 

This is the opposite of the mechanism of general representational painting, a way of 'drawing light' rather than depicting darkness. When you approach the surface of the work, it appears abstract and gradual, but when you look at it from a certain distance, a concrete image gradually emerges, like a landscape, a person, or a place in memory. 

This is a metaphor for the nature of relationships, that is, ways of being that are not clear in themselves but are revealed in interaction.

Recently, the artist has been embracing personal physical changes, especially the experience of decreased eyesight and astigmatism, in the language of painting. The outlines of the images are blurred, and the screen with weakened contrast chooses ambiguity instead of clarity, and overlap and smearing instead of certainty. As a result, the work induces visual illusions and sensory delays that make immediate recognition difficult, and expands into a 'painting of ambivalence' where the concrete and the abstract coexist. 

This is not just an experiment in conversational form, but it leads to a reinterpretation of the theme of 'relationships' in a way that makes sense.

Son Won-young moves between landscapes, people, and spaces, and draws out traces of relationships from places he has ‘experienced firsthand.’ Angkor Wat, the light of stained glass, and the old alleys of Euljiro in Seoul are all others that the artist has encountered, and they become ‘landscapes without people’ in his paintings. 

This is not a work that reproduces a specific space, but a work that transforms the meaning of place through relationships into a painting. Critic Ahn Hyun-jung calls this a 'relational-scape.'

The pieces that make up the work are composed of irregular, non-standardized, color planes that overlap each other to form the screen. 

It is not a structure that fits together like Lego, but rather a loosely assembled piece with holes that create a scene. These objects have different colors, but they do not assert themselves and are in harmony with the whole. This structure resembles the form of relationships we experience in society—meetings and partings that are coincidental but inevitable.

Son Won-young's paintings can be read as a 'state before existence', that is, a field of possibility that has not yet taken shape. Like Plato's 'chôra' reexamined by philosopher Derrida, his screens are a space that prepares for the sensations before creation and events. When each piece comes together, an event occurs, a landscape is formed, and in the process, we experience the boundary between 'me' and 'the other' collapsing within the field of the work. This is the deepest point of Son Won-young's paintings, and at the same time, it is the place where the world he wants to portray, the 'painting of relationships', is born.