Heo Eun Sun, Artist statement
My childhood was rigid as cold, didn’t allow me to say what I should say, and made me hold tears back. I couldn’t help ignoring tons of curiosities slamming the door in my mind. Fortunately, I took painting as my one and only way to mediate burning inside and freezing outside. On painting I started unraveling curiosities and words that I never did. That experience was intuitive, instinctive, and absolute. It became not only a garbage bag for my poor emotional expression when I couldn’t cry, but spring flower garden when I was full of joy. However, little canvas wasn’t enough for all of my curiosities. I opened the door inside of me knocking because I wanted to live whole of ‘me’, and satisfied the curiosities toward outside of me travelling whole world bringing sketchbook.
It changed my sight. It brought me change of thought, not just leaving familiar place to strange place, but seeing familiar one to strange one. By facing everyday life with new view point as it is first seen scene, by finding new things from usual people as I meet them at first, I started to think deeply about ‘relationship and communication’ which is led to my works.
I think this was somehow from ‘absence of communication’ of my childhood. Talking one side only, not listening other side, closing your ears pretending listening with smile. These are problem of absence of communication. I feel uncomfortable of my childhood if I see usual place as strange place. This absence of communication I experienced personally can be expanded to one of this society. People are interested in relationship and communication because you easily feel absence of communication around you. However, not so many people try to solve it. You close your eyes, avoid, shift another’s shoulders, or consider it natural. I cannot bear it. We should shout out and bring out the problem for those who do not know how to cry. We should make people face themselves as they face mirror, and stimulate them to find how to communicate. They need to see usual place as strange and expecting place. Communication makes your life goes organically, and you feel liveliness from every place.
I’m shedding old tears all over me. All emotions come and go inside out. My face once was a black-and-white picture, now starts to be colored. Facial muscles start to shrink. Regaining liveliness is the purpose I’ve shouted communication. If I shift it to other’s shoulders, I would become the other. This is my mission as an artist.
