The relation of the everyday cut-out

There are so many familiar yet tiny, insignificant things that we cannot perceive the value of their existence. Advertisement flyers on the street, advertisements from a newspaper, magazines, and even spam are repeatedly produced, read, and thrown away. Contemporary people are gradually submerged in a flood of images. Kwon Sun-young tries to interpret the world with diverse printing materials representing rapidly changing values. She collects a variety of images by subject matter, cuts out and recomposes them using the collage technique. Pieces detached from the material property of paper are linked again and form a new relationship. They are given a new presence involving the recovery of their material property. Kwon projects aspects of fragmented individuals living in social relations, continuously questioning them.

The artist has constantly collected images easy to grasp such as houses, birds, mushrooms, fish, and plants from the surroundings of her everyday life. Through an act of cutting out paper she exposes its bare skin, completely removing pre-existing knowledge and value. Pieces cut-out from printing materials are combined together as a mosaic, used like paint and brush. Equally dispersed, arranged images create an expanded flow, spreading outward. The borders of these accumulated images become blurred. When seen from a distance they look like an abstract painting in an aggregation of dots. Close-up view however, the images bring about an apparently different feeling. Her brushwork of high density enhances the completeness of her scene by lending a sense of unity to divorced individuals alongside a sense of depth from the thickness of each individual. Colors she adopts as a whole that look slightly artificial due to contrasts of the colors each printing material has evokes moderates tension. Change in the similar colors visible in the background is conducive to alleviating such tension.

Her canvases, covered with collaged pieces look like an object. The artist employs paper as another means for painting, making a shift from painting as drawing to painting as making and aggressively transfiguring the material property of paper to another. The artist considers all processes of producing her artworks by collecting printing, cutting out, gluing materials from her quotidian surroundings equally significant. That is why she focuses on the relation of bridging you and me, art and reality. A new invisible linkage and relation is like a linking pin in life the artist comments on through her work.