Dongwan Kook’s free association with drawing captures the images generated by her hand, and automatically reacts to the shadows created by the light behind the objects that she wants to draw. She does not interfere with the hand’s movement, does not sketch, does not modify the images, and accepts everything that is drawn. As a result, her drawings frequently show images that seem irrelevant to the objects under the paper. In this work, the images are the immediate response of the artist’s hand to specific factors such as the size, font, weight, and letter space of characters placed under the paper where the drawings take place. The 900 × Magnification series was created by painting the drawings revealed in such a way to be 900 times bigger.

The 900-fold magnification is the result of her calculation after she tried drawing the maximum scale she could draw using her arms as a tool. The reason for painting the drawing in an enlarged scale is in the same context with her act of recording and reading her dreams repeatedly for more than a decade. Just as the record of her dreams feels different every time she reads them, the inner images that she catches through free association appear different, depending on the gestures in which she paints them. When the magnification work is done, she attaches paper tape onto the lines left blank in the drawing, paints the surroundings, and tears the tape off to reverse the original positions of the faces and lines. Thus, it is like looking at an unknown world repeatedly through opposite gestures and scale, with a coincidence in painting the work based on the same drawing.

Outbreak 900 × is a 900-fold magnification painting of the drawing Outbreak that was drawn in graphite on paper. Stay at Home Please 900 × is a 900-fold magnification painting of the drawing Stay at Home Please drawn in graphite on paper. In 2020, when the pandemic started. This was a time when a lot of words and terms began to be used quite commonly: stay at home, I promise I stay, 2020, distancing, outbreak, trend, group, connection. When recommended to stay at home, people experienced complex emotions, and words repeatedly heard in the news and communities have gained more serious meaning over time. The artist carried out this work with the desire to see how seemingly familiar but unfamiliar situations—such as the number “2020,” which was a symbol of future society
in the past, and the Korean word “trend” made us think of infectious diseases rather than fashion for the first time—passes through herself.

Outbreak 900 ×

• Acrylic on canvas
• 900 × 1800 mm
• 2020

Stay at Home Please 900 ×

• Acrylic on canvas
• 2700 × 2700 mm
• 2020