When I get bored, I go to look at paintings. There, I can find them on display, people’s hearts, in various flower petal shapes, or discolored into sad yellows and purples. A horse wearing glasses comes tearing down the barren, pitch black mountain. It’s all very amusing because I’ve never seen these things before, a living heart, or dead skin. What brilliant poetry! And here I am just trying to put words down, like insect scratches, on a dry scrap of paper. Beautiful specks of color fill in the wind parts and the ocean parts. The dreams of the artist are completely stained with pigment, still vividly wet. I had dismissed them as mindless scribblings, but now seeing the sparkle of those torn up internal organs, I shudder with pleasure. Leaping rhythms, undulating air. There is something very attractive about this multifaceted life painting on the wall, as it rotates in front of my eyes.
The lines and colors of a painter have the ability to freely materialize an image of a moment into the space of reality—with a magic that succeeds in destroying all mundane notions, quite boldly constructing film images carefully analyzed by both the light of the sun and of the internal spirit. Sometimes it gives shape to things that people had not even considered. Or, completely annihilating those familiar things that bore us, it assigns them new values. I believe that the work of a painter is very similar to that of a poet. I know this because looking at paintings wears me out. However, I doubt there are many poems that are written with this degree of attention to the effect of color- or motif-based composition, the mood engendered by shadows, and lines determining their point of contact with space within a composition. I suspect that most poems are written with whatever random thought occurs to the poet. In some cases that’s fine, although poems like that are already ruined. They are banal and have a short life span.
When painting a single apple, I do not think we should attribute the concept of roundness or redness to the object. Because those arbitrarily defined common-sense notions regarding this single sphere called an apple has no meaningful application in the context of paintings. Even if someone declared that it was red and round, it would only reflect one small aspect of it, and it is still possible that its backside might be rotten and swollen blue, or it might have a jagged cross-section. From every perspective and angle, we should consider the all-inclusive aspects of this thing called apple. That is to say, it is important to grant objects a more three-dimensional observation. Perhaps the way poetry finds expression is by taking materials that had once been reflected into reality and returning them to the realm of thought.
Until now I had been obsessed with the intersection of the diagonals on a single plane. I had often failed to notice the lines passing over the space paralleling these diagonals, or the perpendicular lines dropping down into these diagonals. I wonder how much of the space is occupied not by black or white, but by a hazy vagueness that is neither black nor white. And what a joy it would be to open up the windows of a room held in such mesh-like complexity. I feel that I should pry it open myself.
At the exhibition I saw many completed paintings. Yes, they might be quite accomplished, but these kinds of paintings are just not interesting. They represent a kind of completion within a single territory, or the halting of a movement—they are none other than the communication of an impasse. I was actually more attracted to the works that had failed. That tumult seems indicative of potential. I also felt that there were many works that were influenced by film. For example, the distinction between silhouettes, and of black and white chiaroscuro. There were failed van Goghs, and paintings with two suns, too.
I was so tired I could no longer feel my feet on the ground, but when I stepped outside, the brilliant young green stung my eyes.