I think it was during a meal with artist A that the topic of the Ilmin Museum of Art exhibition came up. Her slight discontent about the exhibition was centered on the subtitle, “Contemporary Realist Painting,” in Hysteria: Contemporary Realist Painting, which he felt was excessive. She questioned whether contemporary realism could be discussed based solely on the works of artists predominantly from Seoul National University, Hongik University, and other Seoul-based institutions. While I agreed with her point, I also understood the perspective of the curators. After all, they clearly stated in the exhibition preface that they were reflecting on “institutionalized realism.” The role of the museum is to establish benchmarks for contemporary art (institutionalization), thus they inevitably focus on works by artists whose practices have been sustained over a long period and have been extensively exposed to criticism. That criticism should start not in the museum but in the alternative spaces that precede it. The problem is that alternative spaces and art criticism have virtually disappeared outside Soeul area. If there is an artistic and cultural gap between the capital region and the provinces, it stems from the absence of experimental spaces and criticism.

In this Hysteria exhibition, the standout artists are Kim Hye-won (b. 1993) and Jo Hyori (b. 1992). Particularly, Jo Hyori is an artist I’ve been following since her work Boots (2020) was exhibited at the Eulji Art Center last year. While Kim Hye-won confronts the gaze through the camera lens and the distortions projected by that lens as a subject of reproduction, Jo Hyori’s language is slightly different. Her work resides in the gray area of surrealism, hyperrealism, and appropriation art. In this exhibition, her works, such as Boots, depicting sleek textures reminiscent of the most basic texture materials of 3D objects; Neo’s Cat (2023), featuring images of black cats losing their collision coordinates; and Good Evening, Mr. Judd (2022), which playfully and blatantly appropriates the abstract struggle of Donald Judd (frame) and Nam June Paik (title) from the last century, all maintain a shared formal beauty of realism (illusionism) while branching out in different directions.

The artist cleverly reveals her meticulous painting technique without making it look outdated. She essentially projects computer-generated (rendered) images directly onto the canvas, evoking an unrealistic sense related to the texture of matter and three-dimensional (x, y, z) space. This might be the point where her visualization of some “illusion” connects. How should one describe her flat paintings? Just as photography has become a ubiquitous production method in realist painting, the idea of transferring modeled, rendered images onto the flat canvas isn’t particularly novel. Yet, due to her exceptional painting skills, viewers often feel as if they’re looking at a monitor display, falling into the illusion. Here, her painting paradoxically involves a hypermediated sense of recognizing the medium through an immersive moment of illusionism. Her work doesn’t appear as a painting but as a screen made of pixels, which ironically embeds the fact that the medium is painting into the viewer’s mind.

By recognizing this flatness, the viewer reaches a fundamental question: “Why represent?” Despite the arrival of new representational media like photography and film in the last century, which freed painting from the obligation of revealing the naked face of the world, humans persistently continue the act of drawing and painting by subjugating new media, including digital media, as materials for the act of drawing. Where does this drive come from? Perhaps drawing is connected to some primal aspect of human nature. Just as children naturally engage in doodling as they learn language and expand their imagination, as long as the brain structure of Homo sapiens remains unchanged, drawing and painting will continue, regardless of how technology and lifestyles change. Even though the myth of medium specificity has been deconstructed, the flat medium of the canvas isn’t going anywhere. However, whether it will be embraced within the category of “contemporary art” is another story, ultimately depending on how art criticism interacts with the times and to what extent. But observing Jo Hyori’s paintings, I can’t help but think that, rather than drifting along with outdated philosophies, the only viable path for painters in contemporary art lies in a continuous exploration of materials they can handle and a dedicated focus on technical education.