Since the advent of modernity, art history has repeatedly defined the “end of painting.”
Through self-referential formalism and later debates on the post-medium condition, painting as a form appears to have been exhaustively articulated within academic institutions. I do not reject this theoretical conclusion. As a logical system, painting has already reached its point of completion.
Yet my practice begins precisely there.
It is not a revival of theory, but a form of life that emerges from outside the boundary presupposed by theory itself—the boundary of “standardized” cognition and the body.
My work does not proceed from the execution of pre-established concepts.
It arises instead from forms of perception grounded in neurodiversity: fluctuations of attention, daily fatigue, and the singular rhythms inscribed in the body.
When I am unable to determine what should be painted, I place the very state of wanting to paint onto the canvas. In this process, the brush moves ahead of conscious thought, and the body overtakes theory. This delay and misalignment constitute the reality of my painting—something that standardized cognitive models cannot fully grasp. Painting is not “dead”; it continues to pulse in places where language oriented toward universality cannot reach.
This bodily sensibility is inseparable from my curatorial and gallery practices. For example, over more than a decade I have remained engaged with the work of a friend who continues to create outside the framework of formal art education.
When attempting to attend to expressions that are fragile and easily overlooked beyond institutional training, I carry a persistent awareness—and fear—that my own vision may be partial or blind. To recognize unfamiliar value without relying on existing criteria is never simple. Yet mere closeness is insufficient. As a responsibility formed through long-term accompaniment, it becomes necessary to construct pathways through which such expressions can reach society—without speaking over them, without anticipating them, and without depriving them of their own pace.
Five years after her first exhibition, she now continues to support and activate the practices of others. This fact demonstrates the importance of such an attitude. When art unsettles everyday values, it alters how people within a community perceive their world.
My practice exists, both physically and mentally, outside the scope of academic art theory. This is not a theoretical rebuttal to theory. Where bodies, nervous systems, and singular conditions of life exceed institutional frameworks, expression remains inevitable—alive and shareable.
Through this pulsing of painting as a form of “counter-evidence,” I continue to ask, in and through practice, how far the scope of art theory might be extended, and how voices that have remained unnamed might come into presence.
Note
For me, this kind of relationship is simply an ordinary form of friendship.
The fact that I needed to use AI to describe it indicates how deep the disconnection is between lived experience and the language typically available to describe it.
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