Danae

Danae is a series that divides a single figure from Greek mythology into three characters with different hair colors. The figure is split into pink, blue and yellow, and each picture is in turn divided into three canvases shaped like the panels of a comic. Danae was locked in a bronze tower by her father, and bore Perseus after Zeus came to her as a shower of gold. In Western painting she has nearly always been shown in one way, reclining on a bed as she receives the golden rain. In this work I wanted to give her a wider range of expressions. If NU-TYPE meant a new type, my second solo exhibition, NU-FRAME (Doosan Gallery Seoul, Seoul, 2015), meant a new frame. A frame is both a way of seeing and a physical structure. Taking the panels of Japanese comics, made of diagonal and straight lines, as my reference, I made the frame of the canvas itself into a comic panel. Drawing panels on a flat surface is not hard, but building wooden stretchers to give them physical form turned out to be harder than I expected. Where one canvas meets the next, I wanted the shadow that forms between them to read like the line that divides the panels of a comic. Danae is one person. I divided her, as if separating colors, into three characters with pink, blue and yellow hair, following the convention of Japanese comics in which a character is recognized by the color of her hair. I wanted to look at a single personality from several directions. I once heard that human emotion, reduced to its minimum, comes down to six: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise. I wanted to give those six emotions to a Danae who had only ever been painted with one expression. Danae Blue, Danae Pink and Danae Yellow (2015, oil on canvas, 261 × 194 cm each) are each made of three shaped canvases joined into one, and within those panels Danae, confined, shows a different emotion in each. Within a single canvas, a full-length figure and a close-up of a face appear together. This comes from the device in comics of overlaying a close-up of the face behind a character to show what she is feeling inside. The three canvases form one picture when joined, but the image sometimes runs continuously across them and sometimes remains partly separate. I wanted to paint a state in which emotions collide and diverge within one picture. Zeus descends to Danae as a shower of gold. In the painting the gold does not fall like rain; it bursts out from behind the figure like an effect in a comic. The white wings in the background stand for Zeus. As a classical Danae is often accompanied by Eros, I placed a small winged Eros to one side of the picture. The exhibition space, too, was arranged like Danae's room. In the window gallery at the front I placed six color-field paintings of the same shape and size as Danae Cut-In. From the entrance one passes the drawings and the paintings of background effects alone, and behind the large wall that divides the space the six expressions appear half hidden. Only on rounding the wall and reaching the innermost part of the space does one come to the three Danaes. I wanted the route to feel like going to see a figure who is confined. It is hard to say which came first, the subject or the form. In part I chose this subject in order to make the frames; in part I looked for a form to suit the subject of Danae. Such things occur to me at the same time, and that is how an idea forms. The series went on in several forms: Danae Drawing (2015, pen on panel, 22 × 16 cm each), six poses and expressions; Danae Composition (2015, oil on canvas, 73 × 117 cm each), the background effects on their own; Danae Cut-In (2015, acrylic on canvas), shaped canvases with the face in close-up; and Danae Cut-In Color (2015), canvases of the same shape reduced to fields of color. All of this is closer to a process of looking at one figure again and again, from different distances and in different forms.