Torso 08 - Art Poster (2021)

The Torso series takes the torso of classical sculpture, a body without arms or legs, as its basis and reconfigures it in the visual language of animation and subculture. Drawing on the climactic transformation scenes of 1990s Japanese magical-girl anime and manga, the paintings depict a space and a time swept up in whirling motion, limbless bodies and spurting blood. When I first studied art history, I learned proportion and form from the Venus de Milo. Scholars had tried to reconstruct the missing arms in various ways, and the conclusion, that she was better off without them, stayed with me for a long time. Rather than restoring what was damaged, to accept the form that remains and find a new way of seeing within it: that, I thought, was a contemporary way of looking. In the final battle of Mamoru Oshii's animated feature Ghost in the Shell (1995), as the protagonist strains to pry open the hatch of a tank, her arms are torn from her body. The scene stayed with me. As a child I found the image somewhat shocking, but when I saw it again years later I saw both the limit of a body that cannot help but break and the will to go beyond it, and the staging struck me as sublime. An ancient sculpture that has lost its limbs, a magical girl's transformation, a combining robot that breaks into pieces and becomes one again. The scenes come from different periods and cultures, but they are alike in being the moment when an incomplete state passes into the next stage. They are points of destruction, collision and regeneration. The Torso series began with a digital drawing, Torso (2011, digital print, 116 × 92 cm), that took its idea from that scene in Ghost in the Shell. I was thinking of things that keep pouring out, of the moment when an explosion turns into light. The picture stayed close to the feel of the original. Once I began painting the torsos in oil on canvas, I started drawing on the transformation scenes of the magical-girl genre. I wanted dynamic images, with a range of expressions and poses, hair streaming amid glittering stars and whirling space. These paintings were shown in my solo exhibition NU-TYPE (Makeshop Art Space, Paju, 2014), and the series continues today. I usually complete the underdrawing on the computer, then transfer it to the canvas and develop it as I paint. The bodies are rendered in the flat, cel-style coloring of animation, but I try to keep the color as vivid as possible even in the dark areas. To give the sense of standing before a painting rather than a comic or an animation screen, I tend to paint the figures larger than life-size. The main works are oil on canvas, 162 × 130 cm. Most of the figures are female nudes. The female body is the subject art has treated longest, and I believe a painting acquires its present context only when it is made on top of that accumulated history. What I paint, though, is not so much the body itself as the moment some event happens to it. From a torso with a face, pink blood spurts out and, together with starlight of many kinds, opens up a new space. Blood, the source of life and the sign of death, becomes glittering, jelly-like drops that fill that moment. The background is made of weightless liquid and the whirling effects of animation. In a flat image, the figure is not the only protagonist. The first torso, following the original scene, had a twisted body and closed eyes, a look that did not separate pain from ecstasy. Repainted on canvas, the torso passed through the imagination of comics and took on a cheerful expression. A body without limbs may have had them cut away, or may not yet have grown them. All that remains is the moment something is released from within. Just as the incomplete form of an ancient sculpture is accepted as a finished one, I carry the bold expressions of manga and animation, possible precisely because they were subculture, into the language of painting. The aim is not so much to bring classical form into the present as to let the images that have accumulated in me collide within painting, and to find the point at which new meaning is generated.