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City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works School of Arts & Sciences Theses Hunter College Spring 1-3-2020 Slender Fraction Junghee Judy Koo CUNY Hunter College How does access to this work benefit you? Let us know! Follow this and additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/hc_sas_etds Part of the Painting Commons Recommended Citation Koo, Junghee Judy, "Slender Fraction" (2020). CUNY Academic Works. https://academicworks.cuny.edu/hc_sas_etds/535 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Hunter College at CUNY Academic Works. It has been accepted for inclusion in School of Arts & Sciences Theses by an authorized administrator of CUNY Academic Works. For more information, please contact AcademicWorks@cuny.edu.
Slender Fraction
by
Junghee Judy Koo
Submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of
Master of Fine Arts Studio Art, Hunter College
The City University of New York
2020
12/16/2019 Lisa Corinne Davis
Date Thesis Sponsor
12/16/2019 Brian Wood
Date Second Reader
Table of Contents I. Linearity 1 II. A Buttery Croissant 4 III. Strangers 6 Bibliography 8 Image List 9 Images of individual works 11 Images of exhibition installation 23
I. Linearity
My first experience going to an art exhibition was at about age nine. My parents and
I went to see Jung-Seob Lee’s retrospective in South Korea. The work that I was most
drawn to was an image of two naked boys catching crabs, drawn on a palm-sized cigarette
box wrapper. When I came back home, I took out my mom’s gum from her bag and peeled
its foil wrapper. As I was chewing gum, I drew smiling faces with a toothpick that looked
like Lee’s naked boys. I reminded myself that it was my first time drawing like Lee, but it
looked ugly. I then crumpled up the silver foil like a ball and tossed it into the trash bin.
This is when I began to garner interest in making.
When I immigrated to New Jersey, I took everything people said literally. For
example, “Break a leg!” or, “You are driving me nuts!” One time, my sister Robyn told me it
is surprising how a plant is still alive when nobody in our house has a green thumb. Upon
hearing this, I immediately visualized a bright viridian green thumb emoji and a gardener’s
smiling face with a thumbs up gesture. A gardener’s glove had grass stain on its fingertip.
Robyn made fun of me for not knowing what “green thumb” meant. She did not know
exactly when, where, or how she learned this idiom. She just knew. Robyn could not explain
it to me, and I did not mind knowing. What I liked about was the mild frustration over
navigating the distance between image fusion in my head and the figurative meaning of
unlikely combination of words.
1
I picked out a number of trivial moments that occur during my commute on the MTA
subway A train in New York City:
Multiple fingerprints on metal railing
Clinking sound of my coffee tumbler in my bag
Pale blue lighting on passengers’ faces
Deciding yellow or orange seats to sit on
A man’s hand that touches an empty seat
A waft of citrus scent drift towards my face
A sound when my bag brushes someone’s shoulder
One strand of hair that tickles my nose
Pink mark on my right wrist from a hair tie
Pink and sweaty mark on my left wrist from a watch band
This kind of accumulation of daily instances became a vocabulary for my paintings. This
addendum gestures to the incompleteness and ongoingness of my art practice. What I
essentially long for in my paintings is teetering between finished and unfinished.
In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel De Certeau calls city dwellers who stroll on
1
the street “Walkers”. Walkers follow streets and avenues to write an urban “text,” which is
left unread. They make use of spaces that are not seen and cannot be seen because their
knowledge of those spaces is blinded. Certeau writes: “Escaping the imaginary totalizations
produced by the eye, the everyday has a certain strangeness that does not surface, or
whose surface is only its upper limit, outlining itself against the visible.”2 What does not
surface, the invisible element, is what fluidly mobilizes the fixed language, thoughts, and
texts.
1
Certeau, Michel . The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Page
93.
2
Ibid.
2
My professor from college, Colleen Asper, once spoke in class about her project that
dealt with language and told us about philosopher David Albert’s response to a question
about language asked at a panel about time. For years, this story was vague in my memory
until I fortunately came across her essay on Jackie Gendel’s paintings, where she records
Albert’s response: “There’s a passage that I like in The Confessions of Saint Augustine where
he says that he wishes that all the words in a sentence could occur at the same time and
3
that’s, no doubt, how God thinks.” To actualize this idea, Colleen would literally pile up
sculpted words on top of one another. She said she never felt she quite figured out how to
think of language outside of a clock-like linear sequence. Then one day a faculty member
4
responded to her unsolved problem saying, “Isn’t that what painting does?”
5
There is a scene in the Disney movie, Alice in Wonderland , where the Mad Hatter
fixes Rabbit’s clock that is two-days-slow. The Mad Hatter first dips the clock in tea, then
opens its back cover and examines it with a saltshaker. He consecutively applies butter,
pours hot tea, slams in two spoons, slathers pink jam, not mustard, and squeezes a quarter
lemon as a finishing touch. He then closes the watch cover and cuts the excess around the
rim. An uncanny feeling is evoked when his stubby but elegant forefinger lies on the knife
spine and trims the pink jelly around the rim in a sawing motion. For a split second the
watch looks calm and repaired, until it goes berserk in the air. The absurdity has a certain
visual logic, despite not making linear sense.
3
Asper, Colleen. Painting and Time in the work of Jackie Gendel. Jeff Bailey Gallery.
4
Ibid.
5
Mantia. Mad Watch. YouTube, 1 Sept. 2007, 0:19-1:25.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26RTlPgg-tA
3
II. A Buttery Croissant
My work is generally driven by my fascination with the mundane, that which goes
unnoticed—a random tune, a speck of light, dust, or the minutiae of daily events—and I
attempt to pull something out that I would have overlooked. There is a joy in the play of
finding meaning, a resonance between the different elements, and then watching those
associations go up in smoke. It is like how a Disney witch gathers up ingredients and
throws them into a cauldron that would cackle, kicking off all kinds of sparks and dust as
she conjures a secret potion.
I paint in multiple layers— Superimposed and peeking through and dissolving back,
these layers function as a kind of network. There are different narratives emerging within
the canvas, fragmented off and embedded like a palimpsest. Under my incessant
re-adjustments, they accumulate and shape voluntary and involuntary memories. This is
like Edward Hopper’s description of the painting, March, by the painter Charles Burchfield:
March is an attempt to reconstruct the intimate sensations of childhood, an effort to
make concrete those intense, formless, inconsistent souvenirs of early youth whose
memory has long since faded by the time the power to express them has arrived, so
6
close to dreams that they disappear when the hand tries to fix their changing forms.
There is a mystical sensation when I make attempts to concretize enigmatic yet
palpable feeling in painting. What I may have encountered goes hidden and mired in
quotidian. It appears I cannot relive the experience that went unnoticed, yet at the same
time I feel as though it is right there.
6
Iversen, Margaret. Beyond Pleasure: Freud, Lacan, Barthes. Penn State University Press. 2007. Pg.
26
4
I mix the mimetic component of memory with fantasy impulses in a similar way that
lathering butter inside of a clock is believed to fix the time. I imagine anxious people
whispering their secret confessions through a narrow hole on the mud wall, or Pyramus
and Thisbe whispering their love through a crack in the house wall. It is as if blowing air on
a wound momentarily lessens the pain. Acting as a briefly soothing gesture for anxiety and
blindness, the narrow hole in the wall evokes an image of the crescent moon; a slender
fraction of the illuminated side against dark. In another dimension, I am reheating a buttery
croissant.
I often make paintings using dark, flat and muted colors in contrast to hints of bright
colors. The color seems to do battle with the delicate line drawing of the image to make
way for sensory experience. Anxiety is made manifest in the dark colors; the brightly lit
colors contain a moment of release.
Viewers probably would not ever guess the plot from the narrative in my painting. I
am not concerned with following linear chronological narrative or any particular plot
points. The meaning of an image may not emerge directly to the viewer as I always have a
backstory behind the work so as to relieve a sense of pressure. I prefer to see the imagery
become allegorical and symbolic, which invites viewers to look and engage with their own
interpretations. Starting a painting with an object or a subject is more of an excuse to paint
what I want to paint than to follow a plot point. In this respect, I do not consider myself as a
narrative painter although I am very much interested in storytelling.
5
III. Strangers
I see my work as being like a stand up comedy joke with no complete set-up or
punchline. If there was a punchline, it would have been postponed indefinitely. As if my
tongue is outrunning my mind, sometimes I say things I did not plan to say. Being a
spectator at my own show, it is impossible for me to ascertain and make clear what exactly
is going on, but rather to move forward from change to change. My point of view is both
self-reflexive and self-deprecating. The logical discomfort and disorder are the humorous
aspects that I attempt to generate in my work.
Sharing laughter with others is correlated with their present viewpoints, as laughter
is a collective understanding and humor “is local and a sense of humor is usually highly
7
context-specific.” I try to pay attention to my sense of perception and how that translates
through physical material, even though what I do on the surface may be active, my point of
view is not enforced. My paintings are rather receptive and quiet. There are specific
meanings to each form in the painting, but they are not presented in a straightforward
8
manner. Things tend to be half-legible remaining disjointed or ambiguous. The gutter
between panels in a comic book act as an invisible messenger passing information but are
simply an empty space giving them an impression of closure.
Through painting I seek to claim the gutter-line experience of non-location,
articulating feelings that have migrated and keep on migrating. I am looking for the
presence of something that titillates and invites curious attention but always remains
7
Critchley, Simon. On Humour: Thinking in Action. Routledge. 2002. Pg. 67.
8
McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. William Morrow Paperbacks. 1994. Pg.
66
6
partially obscure. My paintings are an open-ended backdrop for a protagonist, looming
around to come into the scene at any moment.
7Bibliography
Asper, Colleen. Painting and Time in the work of Jackie Gendel. Jeff Bailey Gallery.
Certeau, Michel . The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1988.
Critchley, Simon. On Humour: Thinking in Action. Routledge. 2002.
Iversen, Margaret. Beyond Pleasure: Freud, Lacan, Barthes. Penn State University Press.
2007.
Mantia. Mad Watch. YouTube, 1 Sept. 2007, 0:19-1:25.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26RTlPgg-tA
McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. William Morrow Paperbacks.
1994.
8Image List
The MFA Thesis II exhibition, laissez faire et laissez passer, c urated by Nicole Kaack:
Hannah Beerman
Brian Yihurn Byun
Elizabeth Harney
Emily Janowick
Judy Koo
Jessica Mensch
Patrick Carlin Mohundro
Jordan Stohl
Andy Ralph
The exhibition was open from December 12, 2019, to January 4, 2020, at the Hunter College
Art Galleries, 205 Hudson Street, New York, NY.
Title and Description for individual works:
When I Feel Lonely 11
oil on canvas, 24 x 30 inches, 2017
My Name is Red 12
oil on canvas, 11 x 16 inches, 2018.
What Plant Says 13
oil stick and oil on canvas, 27 x 30 inches, 2018.
Born with Fair Hair 14
oil on canvas, 26 x 30 inches, 2019.
Slender Fraction 15
pencil, oil pastels, and oil on canvas, 40 x 50 inches, 2019.
Bad Joke 16
oil and permanent oil marker on canvas, 36 x 40 inches, 2019.
I am Coming to a Close 17
oil pastel and oil on canvas, 42 x 54 inches, 2019.
9Slow Cut 8
1
oil on canvas, 26 x 32 inches, 2019.
Magnolia 19
oil on linen, 9 x 12 inches, 2019.
Christmas 0
2
oil pastel and oil on canvas, 42 x 54 inches, 2019.
[2nd Floor Gallery]
ㅎ, the Laughing Man 21
oil on canvas, 27 x 31 inches, 2018.
The Bird Knows 22
oil and permanent oil marker on canvas, 26 x 30 inches, 2018.
1011
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
Exhibition Installation Images
2324
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