Head of Torso

Between the Frames: Fragment of Torso is a series that repaints the Torso series on canvases divided, like the panels of a comic book, into two or three parts. It was presented in Frames of Torso (DDDART, Tokyo, 2025), my first solo exhibition in Tokyo. From the moment I was invited to exhibit, the space itself—a traditional house with tatami rooms—was the most important condition. While planning work for it, I thought it would be meaningful to rework the Torso series, first exhibited in Korea, into the shaped frames of a comic book and show it in Tokyo. The room itself, divided by tatami, pillars, and lattices, was already a space of panels. Irregular frames and comic panels are forms I have tried periodically since the beginning of my practice; after Danae, I also painted a series of shaped canvases for Zodiac. My work does not so much move in one direction as carry on by returning. Forms I began long ago reappear in a different guise when they meet a new subject. I divided a single Torso image across two or three canvases. Most reproduce an existing Torso painting unchanged, though some faces were newly drawn to fit the panels. The canvases are cut on the diagonal like comic panels and hung a few centimeters apart. The image sometimes runs on across the gap and sometimes slips slightly out of line, and at times the same image repeats, overlapping across two panels. I painted them thinking of that divided state, like a comic page split into two or three panels, as one picture. I painted with the places where the works would hang already in mind, such as the alcoves and the spaces between the pillars. I hoped the room's wooden posts and lattices would continue the gaps between the canvases, so that the whole room would read as a single comic page. As it was my first exhibition in Tokyo, I also brought earlier works and showed them in a separate part of the space. Most of the works were modest in size; there was only one large canvas. I divided the image of a single Torso between two long horizontal shaped canvases and one large vertical canvas, making Between the Frames: Fragment of Torso -01 (2025, oil on canvas, 2 panels, 30 × 90 cm each) and a large work of the same title (2025, oil on canvas, 180 × 110 cm). The face goes into the two small panels, the body into the large canvas. Though the large canvas is a single piece, I left the place where the gap would fall empty, as a diagonal band. They can stand apart, and I worked with the idea that, set at a distance from each other in the space, they form a pair. The rest are two-panel works, such as Between the Frames: Fragment of Torso 01 (2025, oil on canvas, 2 panels, 40 × 90 cm each), except for one three-panel work, Between the Frames: Fragment of Torso 05 (2025, oil on canvas, 3 panels, 91 × 19 cm each). Their long side is about 90 cm, and each is divided in a different direction and proportion. The picture never shows everything, and I am not even sure that art has to hold everything. Sometimes a bold cut, like a torso, is enough. At some point I began to feel that the shaped canvas is itself a torso. Even the gaps between the canvases can be filled by the viewer's imagination. I am carrying on with new work, wondering whether the space between pictures, the gap between panels, might become a clue for opening up new images and spaces.