Kwon Min Jhang

Artist Statement

I have been curious about light since I was a child. Where does that light come from? The question stayed with me, and I began painting in search of the origin of light. As I painted, I came to understand something. To ask about light is, in the end, to ask about people. We are not beings who live in a cold vacuum, but in a reality with a pulse.

For a long time I believed I was painting light. Now I think a little differently. What I want to paint is not light itself, but the moment just before light comes into being, the moment something begins at a single center. How can an invisible movement leave its trace on matter? These days, my work begins with this question.

I paint with my hands instead of brushes. I dip my fingertips in paint and fill the surface one touch at a time, the way one presses the keys of a piano. With my fingertips I push up thick ridges of paint, then carve into them with sharp tools I make myself. I build up, carve away, and build up again. I repeat the same motion countless times, yet no two marks ever come out the same. The strength of my hand, my pulse, and my breathing differ slightly each day. Those small differences gather into the breath and rhythm of the painting.

So my work is less about making an image than about accumulating time. As I weave the strands toward the center, I feel excited, my heart races, and sometimes tears come. Then at some point I forget myself. That time of absorption hardens onto the surface just as it is. I wait for the moment the painting begins to grow on its own.

Every work begins from a single center. I have not decided what that center is. It could be the beginning of life, a place where the mind gathers, or something that has no name yet. What matters to me is not its shape but the movement that begins there.

Only the direction of the small point rising at the center of the canvas is certain. This point is not a bump left behind by technique. It is the place where the cold outside of reality and the warm interior meet. Reality and the ideal, body and soul. When these divided worlds meet at this one point, I believe a person can fill the emptiness of existence and draw closer to the truth of living.

I could have turned this point upward, toward the sky. Instead I let it follow gravity and point down, toward the ground I stand on. I believe the meaning of life is found not in a distant ideal but in the reality beneath our feet, here and now. As we live, we are shaken by countless waves and often lose ourselves. Still, the place where we can take back the sovereignty of our own lives is not the empty air but this solid ground. That is why the point is my compass. My paintings are not a way of leaving reality, but a way of looking into it more deeply.

This is also why my paintings gather into circles. The circle is the simplest of forms, yet it spreads outward without boundary. The light I try to hold is not an abstract light of ideas but the real light we meet every day. Only then, I think, can anyone stand before a painting and look comfortably into themselves. Blue and green, violet and red are not symbols, each carrying a different meaning. They are variations, different breaths and temperatures within the same structure of becoming. What I hold onto until the end is not color but the center, not form but rhythm, not the finished image but the process of its making.

Many people see my paintings and think of Neolithic comb-pattern pottery. I welcome that. Long ago, people moved their hands over clay, again and again, carving the world as they understood it. Today, on canvas, I am carving invisible order with the same heart. Materials and times change, but I believe the language the hand remembers carries on.

I am not trying to give answers with my paintings. I simply believe in the moment when an unseen order slowly reveals itself under repeated fingertips. And if someone standing before these paintings finds their own breath, their own time, and the center of their own life again, then my work will continue inside that person as another becoming. As long as the strength in my fingertips allows, I will not stop this journey.

Setting Light Down

- Kwon Minjhang's The Origin series

Somewhere along the way, the word "light" fell out of Kwon Minjhang's titles. The series he began around 2018 as Light of the Origin has, since 2022, gone simply by The Origin. Two words dropped from a title; an entire line of questioning quietly relocated. If there is a key to this body of work, it may lie less in what the paintings depict than in that small act of renaming.

Up close, these are not images of radiance so much as terrains of it. Kwon abandoned the brush years ago. He loads pigment onto his fingertips and presses it up into ridges, then cuts back into them with blades he fabricates himself — a method he calls jidu jeommyo, fingertip pointillism. Built up, carved away, built up again, the surface accrues through tens of thousands of touches, no two alike; the day's pressure, pulse, and breathing enter the paint as an involuntary signature. Light, here, is not depicted. It is what happens when illumination rakes across an accumulated relief — not the painting's subject but its consequence.

It did not begin this way. The early canvases — Following Memory of the Light (2018) among them — chased an object: the oldest light in memory, the light of a child's awe. The question then was a noun. Where does light come from? What is the origin? Meditation supplied the method; a luminous circle at the center of a square field supplied the answer, imagined as a passage between paired worlds — the real and the ideal, body and soul. Even then, though, one decision had already been made that would eventually undo this metaphysics from within. At the center of every canvas rises a small peak, and Kwon points it not upward, toward heaven, but down, toward the ground he stands on.

Follow that decision to its conclusion and the renaming becomes inevitable. If truth is located not beyond the world but under one's feet, then origin cannot remain a symbol to be pictured. It must become an event to be enacted — in labor, in duration, in the body. The recent work accepts this. "What I want to paint," Kwon says, "is not light itself but the moment just before light comes into being." The question has shifted from noun to verb: not what the origin is, but how anything begins.

The paintings register the shift. Where the early circles glowed statically out of darkness, The Origin 13-1 (2022) sets the whole field turning, its radial strands bent into a pinwheel torque. The Origin 65 (2024) condenses that motion into a single taut sphere adrift on a breathing ground, while The Origin 67 (2024) lets every filament run in waves to the edge of the canvas. The center, meanwhile, has shed its iconography. No longer sun or source, it is a deliberately unadjudicated coordinate — the start of a life, a gathering of attention, a possibility not yet named — and what Kwon commits to is only the movement it releases. One principle, rotated through variations: the series reads less as repetition than as research.

It is worth locating this on the map. Kwon's working vocabulary — origin, essence, inner light — descends from the spiritual wing of early abstraction, the lineage Kandinsky opened with Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911), Mondrian and Malevich pushed forward inside mysticism's force field, and postwar color-field painting inherited under the name of the sublime. That tradition, almost without exception, pointed up: dissolve matter, ascend to spirit. Kwon takes the inherited question and inverts its vector. His apex obeys gravity; his spirit does not leave matter but is generated inside its thickness. Trading transcendence for immanence is precisely what lets an old question speak in the present tense.

The methodological ancestry sits closer to home. The discarded brush, the devotional repetition, the act congealing into the image — all of this is the legacy of Korean Dansaekhwa, of Park Seo-bo's pencil-scored Écriture and Ha Chong-hyun's paint forced through burlap. But where Dansaekhwa's repetitions tended to empty the field toward silence, Kwon's grow it. His is a discipline of generation rather than erasure, a density of becoming rather than of quiet. Hence the frequent, and apt, association of his surfaces with Neolithic comb-pattern earthenware: hands moving in rhythm over a ground, transcribing an order they cannot see. A private practice plugs into a far older lineage — the hand as humanity's first instrument of understanding.

And the moment, as it happens, has circled back to him. Since Hilma af Klint's 2018 Guggenheim retrospective broke the museum's attendance records, the spiritual has returned to serious contemporary discussion, and fatigue with digital acceleration has restored the prestige of slow, manual, durational work. Kwon's painting is not a product of that turn but its precedent — a decade spent digging in one place until the times came around to meet him. He did not arrive late; the era arrived where he was already standing.

What the viewer receives before The Origin is not a finished image but an invitation into a process. Hardened onto the surface are the painter's pulse, breath, and absorption; following its grain, one's own time slows to match. And when the downward apex returns the gaze to the floor, the origin restarts not inside the picture but in the place where the viewer stands. Only after setting the name of light down could this painting earn the name of origin. The Origin names not a thing but an event — one still in progress.

Kwon Min Jhang

Biography

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