Healing life's wounds

MiKaPoKa

Roman philosopher and stateman Cicero (106-43 B.C.) said  “The face is a picture of the mind as the eyes are its interpreter”  and this quotation actually got me while staring at  Kwon Kyung-yup 's paintings and portraits.

Kwon Kyung-yup is a gifted young lady painter, fine arts graduated from Sejong University of Seoul, South Korea, whose works show young girl faces with snow-white complexion, immature sexual identity, shy and having a strong wish of self protection as if not wanting to reveal their true heart and emotions.

Most of her impressively realistic portraits show bandages covering the head or parts of the melancholic and almost asexual girls faces making the onlooker feel a bit unsettling yet moved to compassion while expressing the shock they've been struggling with.

She depicts their own sense of trauma by shedding tears, vacant glances, bloodshot eyes with gauze and swabs dressing but in her works anyway bandages have a different meaning, they suggest to be consoling, to take care and protect them hiding not only the body's wounds yet the injuries stored as a memory of the body, the ontological and spiritual ones.
As if to say that we may forget hurts but the body never does.

Quite the opposite of monumental, strongly pigmented flesh and blood paintings by Jenny Saville's who is more focused on the process of body marking and corrosion in a surgical matter.
The girls' tears are crystalized to heal their sense of trauma as well to purify body and memory wounds and in this very manner the artist faces her own trauma encountering the archetype of her forgotten wounds.

“...silence is a virtue, use it for your own protection
They'll try to make you play their game, refuse to show your face
If you don't want to be beaten down, refuse to join their race
Be exactly who you want to be, do what you want to do
I am he and she is she but you're the only you”.
The Crass, Big A, little A, 1980