A mass of feelings

  Human beings recognize the object and experience life through the corporal senses. The body is like a living repository where all the memories of experienced moments are documented. Countless thoughts and sentiments of moments are stacked and sunken in the inside until they come up by an external stimulation. Those complex emotions and memories hard to be explained are combined with one’s own soul in form of a mass as shown in the screen. Specially, agony works as the motive of Ham Mihye’s creativity. In the chunk of feelings raised from the inside muddled with the body, a random effect of the technique and expressionist colors are frosted aggravating the messiness. The author does not want a sound form of what intends to express. She aims at a state of denial that cannot be defined in a specific word, and the title of the exhibition ‘Aporia’ represents that status that ultimately cannot be interpreted.

For the author, agony is an indispensable element and a joy that must be accepted as it is. Pain makes one open the eyes and see life in a new way, leading to create new beautiful things and understand new forms of language. The fragments of feelings encroached in the inner world of the author, turns into a form of an abnormal and bizarre mass by the power of the pain. In the process of visualizing such invisible forces, various structures of emotions are reflected between the forms. This creates not a positive or negative but a real chunk that exists by itself.

In Ham’s work, the most noticeable thing is the image of the human being that is uncomfortably crouched. The lump mixed with unrecognizable elements that seems almost painful, makes it totally ambiguous. Exposing only parts of the body like arms or legs and thoroughly hiding parts like the face which represents the identity, arouses an indefinable fear. The author frequents the conscious and unconscious with the base at the form of the body, and adds delicate brushes according to her emotion on impulse. The limits of the image that looses according to feelings that flow with no plans at first, creates forms and motions that cannot be expected. The human body shows the fragile and vulnerable proclivity and reflects the diverse emotion that the author has. The tension and the relaxation of the invisible force give natural movement to the screen and show the inevitable relation between the forms of the body that change according to the alteration of the feelings in each moment.

The author uses traditional materials of the Oriental painting, jangji (Korean paper) and muk (traditional Korean ink) basically, and mixes various materials and colors and looses with no classification the chunks of emotion. The space where the mass is formed is abstract or a private place like one’s room, and in common they have strong sense isolation. The elegant expression of the fabric with lines of the ink that appears in some works, gives a mythical feeling which associates the image of the mass that falls into agony escaping from the mundane world. In recent pieces appear ordinary scenes using the perspective. This expresses the masses unexpected results of feelings formed according to encounters of emotions formerly left with spaces that were accidentally passed by. This way, the stories of the work pieces are completely started from the inner side of the author. What she aims at is not a representation of the world or an object, but rather a art as the emotion itself. It tries to express the forces that wiggle at the end of our hand that capture us. Moreover, the swirl of energy that is felt in it, is like a new beginning that turns everything into ‘absence’.

It is not very comfortable to see bizarre masses that have no clear shapes. That will be because it goes against the drive of wanting to wrap things up beautifully, and because it is close to the inner existence that people want to hide, instead of showing the skin of human beings. If one stops to think what the vague chunk makes him feel, it will be the power that pain and agony has that crumbles and holds on everything. The author tries to draw out the human being’s basic and essential common experiences. Ham Mihye’s creation of the strange form that lays in the boundary line between the object and nonobjective, acts not on one’s mind but on one’s heart.