Boundary thoughts, the amusingness in the senses

1. Red flowers bloom in the perceived world
Every human being has his/her own utopia. Especially for an artist, utopia is often an important theme of works. The artists dream of lost paradise through primitive nature or past old time, or meditate on religious and contemplative utopia in their works. The artist, Bae Nam-ju, raises the question on utopia, which is noticeable because such question visualizes sensible utopia in the contemporary context.
Bae Nam-ju captures red or blue landscape. Characters and settings are standstill in such still shot-like scenes. It is the moment of eternal time captured. Rich deep colors dance beyond time and space just like in a fantasy film. The main character with horn wander around the seascape, or tall trees or flowers cast their heavy shade, rocking in sadness. His works <Island of previous days, 2011> and <You were in red at that time, 2011> cast deep and damp poetic images. His works imply creativity built up on rich story telling.
The artist shows us defamiliarized utopia. This defamilarization shown in <beautiful stranger, 2012> is also the proof that shows this artist‘s transition from visual and material world into mental and ontological world. The images of characters with horns or deers, monkeys and cats with antlers are a kind of medium or antenna to communicate with nature. The icons such as antlers, trees and poles are derived from classic transition. Thus, we can assume that this artist’s landscape means the existential essence of nature and his utopia reaching supernatural universe. In fact, the language regarding this defamilarization is also this artist‘s viewpoint that captures the world and penetrates through his all works.
From the artist‘s canvas, subjective and sensitized color senses are seen. That is, they are natural landscape interpreted by sensory organ into mentality. This reminds us of the Maurice Merleau Ponty's interpretation saying that “The world is another giant body that communicate information with human body, in one organic system”.(Cho Gwang-je et al. <<Flow of Contemporary Philosophy>>, Dongneok, p.91) Ponty insisted that the outside world connected our physical body is the source of genuine truth and our existence as human being can be achieved when they become totally one. That is, we sense the world with our own physical body.
In Bae Nam-ju's works, such enforced variations of senses are scattered. This is connected to Ponty's phenomenology, the philosophy of body. His defamiliarized utopia is the sensory world captured by artist‘s perception, where red flowers bloom and black cats breathe.

2. From reality to surrealism: amusingness of uncertainty
Bae Nam-ju's sensory world is the mental one that exists on the boundary between life and death. The mental world is transitional surrealism world based on reality. This uncertain transitional world is both reality and surrealism as the artist‘s subjective world. As the artist earlier mentioned, the world is uncertain without questions and values, as the intermediate world between happiness and unhappiness, hot and cold. This is mystique and profound. The artist calls this intermediate world.
In fact, this intermediate world is the stable world with sliding signifier as Derrida said. Thoughts on uncertain and unstable boundary are the language of post-modernism society. The artist is immersed into senses, and then feeling eternal stability and infinite imagination in his own utopia, the intermediate world reborn in glorious colors. The artist reveals the tyranny of conventional binomial opposition view-in and out, up and down, man and woman, power and surrender-, negating any superior-inferior type thoughts and concepts. According to him, the meaning difference and sliding/overlapping signifier only exist. Maybe, the artist suggests ideal model of thoughts beyond conventional binomial opposition view and Yes/No value decision system. In his thoughts, only sensible landscape is visualized, only with the expressions of pure beings captured by body senses.
In fact, it seems the artist thinks about his utopia, intermediate world, with the lack of superior-inferior concept, in order to make effort to capture the meaning of self and essential beings in the outside environment. That is, the world of perception and sensor is on the process of finding the existentialism of human beings. His works imply negative esthetic experience such as emptiness, anxiety and fear. With these, positive experience on splendor and mystique coexist. Such fear and beauty bring tensions in the paintings. Thus, his works aim at not implementing convenient painting experience, but visualizing self-reflected and subjective thoughts on the boundary of contemporary signification or thoughts.
The cat with mystique landscape of pink and yellow flowers can be seen as artist‘s arranged language about intermediate world. The artist’s visual experience with sensors of body immersed to nature is maximized in the works <Golden, 2011>, <Demian, 2011>. As in the film technique called Montage, two different screens look like being crossed over, showing the encounter of mentality in the perceived world between human beings and nature.
In such world, flowers are nature and objects, with the possibility of various variations. Through the world set by the artist, the fictions of conventional binomial opposition views are revealed, opening the door of extended sensory world. In Bae Nam-ju's utopia, transcendental space coexists with sealed eternal life and mentality. The expression of perfect essentialism lives on there. This is also the tracks of the artist‘s thoughts on spirituality or sacred one away from tainted mentality and secular life. This shows that another defamiliarized amusingness regarding the artist’s mental world has started. (2013.6)

Park Ok-saeng, Art Critic, Director of Park Ok-saeng Art Institute