The moments of being on edge or caught in anxiety frequently occur every day. Although abruptly ignoring them may be the wisest thing to do, if you are brave enough to hold and look into them, they turn out to be a valuable switch. Because being aware of them can transform the matter(trouble) into another matter(question). Rho Eunjoo makes an additional effort to go through multiple phases of warming up before standing in front of a canvas. It is not only a necessary procedure to be preoccupied with the targets of depiction but a step to relive/observe her tense state of mind. Drawing, modelling, directing, and shooting. Once the long course of searching clarifies inside and from a body and she grabs the corner of it, it is time. Begin.
While Rho planned Knot to Leaf, she recalled garden-scape. Let us suppose that filling in a canvas plane is analogous to turning unused land into a garden. Making the given land with borders even at first, dividing it into sections and planting seedlings depending on a composition scheme follow. The hands trim protrusive parts for flawless finishing, and an assemblage of numerous intentions constantly adjust themselves by a final design. They are compatible metaphors for a course of painting.
In her latest exhibition, Rho managed to represent the physical traits of objects in images by employing a group of objects in disparate characters and textures, a relative understanding of scales, movements of bodies and objects, transparency and penetration. [1] For this time, the seeds planted in her garden are withered flower stems, wires, threads and melted-and-reshaped unknown materials that weave them together.
Rho Eunjoo's garden conveys four themes. The size of Knots-Branch (2023), occupying the entire front window of the exhibition space and its indoor walls, overwhelms visitors, and Knots-Spot (2023) depicts an enlarged landscape where diverse objects get entangled and deformed to be dots and lines and eventually lumps. The sizes of Knots-Branch (2023) and Knots-Spot(2023), occupying the entire front window of the exhibition space and its indoor walls, overwhelm visitors. They depict enlarged landscapes where diverse objects get entangled and deformed to be dots and lines and eventually lumps. As a result, the visitors' gaze chasing after the clinging shapes floating across the plane becomes busier than ever. Secondly, the series of Still Light (2023) contains more identifiable lines and mass. At the rear of dried branches adhering to wires and the bodies of spherical structures wrapped with fluid degenerated matter like knots, the dusky colours of the backdrop seem to give billowing rhythms to the described front figures. The particular temporality, when the soft things are solidifying, the straightened things are declining, and the day is breaking, is a crucial leitmotif penetrating her practice for a long time. Objects of Rho Eunjoo used to be fastened to the ground as if they had been posing on a stage. However, some factors that enabled us to guess the background’s origin have disappeared in her new series. By removing the shadows, which revealed the hierarchy between the objects in her prior paintings, some of the scenes newly produced look like drifting in the air. Still Shadow (2023) captures "the instant when objects hide their bodies according to the directions of light in the dark as if they were shadows themselves." [2] Lastly, as an extensive outcome of collaboration, Long Arrangement-OC-2023[3] establishes gardens on a canvas made from leftover sheets of cloth. For Rho, collaboration means turning around the state of tension to be positive. Difficulties and charms of collaborations often stem from the fact that irreversible conditions are given by the other. In this context, how remarkably coincidental is that a metaphor of a garden satisfies the situation that urban gardens are generally approved to be built only in spare fields?
In order to catch the most of the tactile experiences attained throughout the warm-up phase, Rho takes pictures of the targets and revives them on the canvas. The experiences include not only the physical features of the objects sensitive to handle, as they are solid, stiff, squishy and easily bent, but so-called motions such as the lapse of time, travels of light and glance and subtle trembling of objects. As you follow after the figurations delivered by the visual-haptic mechanism, you highly likely have an experience or delusion in which ‘touching’ is possible through the eyes. Nevertheless, is what our haptic sensation tells us to be identical to what the artist experienced? Does the garden that the artist painted contain only fragments of the specific time locked in the photos taken by the artist? Naturally, the embodied sensual experiences steadily become hazy, and some accidental aspects unconsciously in-grow into their niches. The linguistic connotation engraves impure marks even on ‘touches’ of viewers’ eyes; therefore, the verbal expressions—strings of thread and dried trunks, entangled wires and fruits and knots and leaves—leave a similar but fathomlessly broad spectrum of symbols to individuals. Whenever what is seen overlays and scrapes along what is imagined, coincidences and senses mingle. Obviously, the photos gripped by a hand and the paintings portraying them are far different. I dare to call what happens between the two a kind of movement. The movement is closer to roaming in the air rather than a bouncing motion as palpable as the comings and goings a ping pong ball can create. Being the tiniest particles' movements that never fade away, although they agglomerate and break easily, anxiety and tension transform into bodily tremors and leave their ever-lasting traces by continuing to hold and fall off. These tiniest specks of dust’s movements never fade away, although they agglomerate and break easily. Similarly, anxiety and tension transform into bodily tremors and leave their ever-lasting traces by continuing to hold and fall off.
Gardening is a race of thinning out. You win the game if you do not mistake regarding the heterogeneous as dangerous stuff. Even in a garden well-fostered without defects, it is impossible to protect it from coincidences changed every minute by the low gust of wind, birds nesting on trees, insects creeping under the blazing sun or an unexpected rain shower. Despite the consistency of artificiality, the persistence of climbing plants does not frustrate and eventually takes up a corner of it to make it their own. We are bound to encounter the conclusion that the hint of doubt always remains in spite of the firm foundation and that the coincidences are neither simply coincidental nor occurring by chance. Between this and that, or then and now, there are only mirror images reflecting each other misinterpreted into coincidences. (The trivial discovery that gardening (Jo-kyeong) is a homophone of a mirror in Korean evokes a silly pleasure.) This exhibition of Rho Eunjoo unveils her determined attempts to capture no coincidences but reflections and their knotted motility, which suddenly invade the fence of overlaying intentions, in other words, Rho Eunjoo's garden.
Text by Shin Jiyi (Independent Curator)
Translation Jung Su
[1] 『어스름의 면과 선과 덩어리 Faces, Lines and Lumps of Dusk』: the critical review by Shin Jiyi for ⟪Blue Window⟫, a solo exhibition by Rho Eunjoo in 2021.
[2] Artist’s Note
[3] OC Project: a collaboration with a fellow artist, Son Jooyoung. The paintings of the project have narrow widths since they only reuse leftover pieces of canvas fabric. For <Long Arrangement-OC-2023-1> and<Long Arrangement-OC-2023-2>, Rho used the cloth left after producing the identical size of canvases for <Knots-Spot> and <Knots-Branch>.