Where Art Begins

1. Conditions of Making

My artistic practice does not begin with intention, planning, or a clearly defined idea of what I want to express.
Rather, it begins at the moment when those things stop functioning.

There are times when I think, “I want to paint,” yet cannot paint at all.
At the same time, during ordinary activities—cleaning the studio, moving through daily life—unexplainable discomfort, fatigue, or emotional residue accumulates. When this accumulation reaches a certain threshold, the act of painting arises naturally.

At such moments, making is not experienced as a clear progression through time.
Mental making has already been ongoing for a long while, and only when I move toward physical preparation does it become visible. There is little sense of beginning or of progress; when I realize what has happened, the making is already over, leaving behind only intense exhaustion and traces of the act.

What matters is that this making is not carried out through “choice” or “decision.”
Materials and techniques differ each time, but this is not the result of free experimentation. They are determined naturally, within the range permitted by my physical condition and the surrounding environment at that moment.

For this reason, individual works exist less as independent, completed objects than as traces of the same underlying conditions passing through different situations.
I recognize my works not as isolated pieces but as a body of work, because the conditions that give rise to them remain fundamentally consistent.

The integrity of my practice is preserved precisely because these conditions are not manipulated by intention or language.
The practice of Andecian Art Project is also an ongoing attempt to explore and confirm these conditions from within, through making and shared situations.


2. Conditions of Verbalization

Verbalization, however, requires conditions different from those of making.
Language demands that events be placed within time, that causal relationships be organized, and that reasons—“why something happened”—be made explicit.

In my practice, however, thought and intention have already receded by the time making occurs.
When I try to explain my work in my own words, I often feel as though I am inventing reasons or meanings afterward—things that did not actually exist at the moment of making.

If I attempt to reflect pre-linguistic elements directly through language, the level of inquiry shifts away from where the work truly operates.
The more I refine my bodily sensitivity, the further my practice moves from language and institutional frameworks. This creates a paradox: over twenty years, it was not that I lacked words, but that no words existed that could describe the work without damaging it.

My practice maintains its integrity precisely because it cannot be fully verbalized by me.
AI-assisted verbalization helps to indicate these conditions from the outside, without interfering with the conditions under which the work is made.

When language turns making into a set of explanations or reproducible procedures, the work easily becomes something that can be managed and controlled.
Using AI as a mediating tool minimizes such interference and clarifies that the work exists at a depth prior to language.

For me, verbalization is not an act of explaining my work.
It is a way of confirming, after the fact, that making took place in a realm prior to language.
The very fact that it cannot be fully verbalized serves as a guarantee that the work has not yet been operationalized or reduced to a reproducible method.


3. Conditions of Art

What I am addressing here is not a new art theory or a new model of thinking.
What is at stake are the conditions that art itself has long taken for granted.

Since the modern period, art has often been explained through “concepts” and “meanings,” and treated as if being graspable through thought and language were a condition of its value.
This assumption, however, has structurally misunderstood certain fundamental modes of art.

The issue here is not the limits of thought or the inadequacy of theory.
What I am pointing to are vital conditions that are already at work between body and environment, prior to the emergence of thought and language.

Before art became a medium for transmitting meaning, it was an act that mediated tensions and transformations of life itself.
The life I refer to here may connect to terms such as “soul” or “shamanic,” but it does not point to a domain defined by belief or metaphysics.

Whether an artist works from a background of faith or from a strictly materialist standpoint, what ultimately matters are the real conditions of making.
These conditions appear as an unmanageable “depth” that exists prior to being absorbed into institutions or language.

When making that takes place at this depth is forced into systems of explanation, meaning, or concept, there is a risk that what is vital will be processed at the level of abstraction.
In this sense, the concept can turn into a form of violation against what exists at the level of life.

This is not an ethical accusation.
It is a structural problem that arises when things of different orders are treated under the same conditions.

If art nourishes life, it is not because it conveys ideas or messages.
It is because, at a depth prior to management by language or institutions, making has sustained and renewed the breath of life.

In treating this breath as something “unorganized” or “pre-theoretical,” and in believing it to be replaceable by concepts, modern art history has crossed the boundary of life through language.
Care must be taken to distinguish between words that predefine depth and words that seek to explore it.
If, in that process, art has lost its original role of sustaining life, then it can be said that a form of risk is embedded there—one that resembles the conformist pressures produced by religious authority.

What is occurring here is not the addition of new values.
It is a structural reversal of positions: against the assumption that explainability guarantees value, I point to a depth of making that has been preserved precisely by remaining unexplainable.

This reversal does not aim to mystify art, nor to reject thought or language.
It seeks to handle the sacred not as something managed by religious authorities, but as something that exists within the realm of everyday life.
That is what I understand as the “conditions of art.”

From this perspective, the way we regard those who continue to make work physically or mentally outside institutional frameworks is no longer a matter of social support, but of recognizing their practice as making that exists on the same horizontal plane.

This is an attempt to return to their precise place the fact that art once existed as the breath of life, prior to thought and language.
As a result, irregular and uneven corporeality emerges as the artist’s prerogative, and the boundary between art and religion becomes visible of its own accord.
Art thus regains its force as the last form of resistance through which human beings continue to remain human.

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