Automotive Fine Art자동차 회화

The Artist's Thoughts

You paint cars, and yet to call this simply 'automobile painting' feels like it misses something. How would you introduce your work?

I paint cars, but what I'm trying to say on the canvas has never once been the car. What I'm after is speed — and by speed I don't mean the sensation of going fast, I mean time. When I push paint across the surface with a squeegee, what remains is not the distance travelled but the trace of time that has already passed. So what stays on the surface is not the car but time itself. The form of automobile painting is only borrowed; what I'm really painting is a person living their way through that speed.

Then why the car, of all things? There are so many other subjects — was there a reason it had to be the automobile?

There is an instinct in the automobile: a force that wants only to press forward, an impulse to race that knows no way to stop, a kind of blindness that never asks where it's going and throws itself into speed for its own sake. I set that mechanical instinct right in front of our inner life. Inside us too there is an urge that keeps driving us forward, and at the same time an anxiety that doesn't know where all that racing is headed — for me, the work is the single event in which those two collide head-on. So the car is not really my subject; it is closer to a mirror, reflecting the struggle a person wages with the speed inside themselves.

Because you work with speed and the automobile, some might think of early-20th-century Futurism. How is your work different from Futurism?

On the surface they may look alike, but they face in opposite directions. Futurism glorified the machine and speed — it believed that the faster thing was the more beautiful. I stand on the other side. This age already commands us to go 'faster,' and I refuse to worship that speed — yet I don't smash it either. I pass through speed to recover what it has erased: the human inner life, and the time we've moved through. So when form dissolves on my canvas, it is not destruction but revelation. If Futurism was a hymn to the machine, mine is closer to a counter-current — an attempt to recover the human in the very midst of the race.

Your method is unusual. Rather than a brush, you scrape the paint with a squeegee. In the studio, what does that moment actually feel like?

The moment I drive acrylic paint across the surface with a squeegee is always a little chilling, because once it passes there is no taking it back. Sometimes a color I laid down earlier glimmers faintly up through the place I've just scraped, and those accumulated layers are what I call 'memory.' In the resistance of the paint at my fingertips, in that brief tension that is over in an instant, an entire span of time — something passing through and then vanishing — is pressed flat. So before I draw a single stroke I hesitate for a long while, and once it's drawn I stand and study the mark just as long.

Your work seems to keep changing as time passes. Only two years ago you were laying embroidery thread over the canvas, and now you've stripped even that away, painting with the squeegee alone. Why do you keep taking things away?

My work evolves and changes ceaselessly, along with its times — and that change itself is what I'm trying to paint. There was a time I laid down lines of rule and relationship with embroidery thread, but now I've removed even that and push the surface with the squeegee alone, because the more I strip away, the more honest it feels. To me a painting is the span of time where the clock of my own searching hangs. As I grow older my thoughts shift; they compromise, they persuade, they collide and cross one another. Within that there is still the fear of challenging something new, and the many pains of passing through that fear. I don't hide that unsteadiness — I leave it on the surface. How a single person changes within time: in the end, that is what my painting is telling.

Your work increasingly lets the form break down, moving toward an abstraction where the car is hard to make out. Why deliberately dismantle the image? And in that place, what does the viewer come to see?

For me, distortion is not destruction but growth. I believe that identity is forged precisely at the point where form collapses. The sharper the car's outline, the more people stop at 'ah, that's a car' — but the more the image scatters, the more the viewer begins to look not at the painting but at themselves. When it isn't clear what has been depicted, people draw their own experiences and anxieties into that empty space and fill it. I believe the face that surfaces this way is, in the end, a portrait of the contemporary human — the inner life of all of us, straining not to lose ourselves inside a speed that drives us relentlessly forward.

Finally, where can those who want to encounter your work in person find it? And at the end of all this racing, what is the question you ultimately leave us with?

The original works only reveal themselves once the thickness of the paint layers stands directly before you, so anyone genuinely curious about the actual pieces is best to reach out by email. The originals also meet collectors around the world through international art platforms such as Artsper, Saatchi Art, Singulart and Artmajeur. And for those who love cars, I've built a separate poster brand registered as a trademark, MINSEOK® — my watercolor car works turned into art posters, available on Amazon in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Germany. Whatever form the encounter takes, what I hope for is one thing — that you pause before it for a moment and look back at the speed within you and the time that speed has passed through. The machine never stops; it only races forward. The human, though, is a being who, in the very midst of that speed, asks again: what on earth am I? In the end, my work is — from first to last — a scraping and layering toward that single question: what is a human being?