Turn Switch Jump: 이은
Author: Lee Sora
Title: Traces of Movement that Give Life
There are moving images in paintings. For example, in a 2021 work, Miss Bunny shyly but eagerly leans toward Dumper to touch lips, her nose twitching, while Dumper’s ears curl up and left foot trembles, capturing a moment of excited anticipation. Another 2021 painting shows a figure holding their face with hands (or wings) and shaking their upper body up and down in intense anger. In yet another, stacks of banknotes are flipped endlessly, one after another. A repeated “Good morning”, not once but many times, becomes its own gesture (2021).
These paintings originate from GIFs; short, moving clips taken from longer videos. A GIF isolates a single fragment of its source, erasing the original creator’s intent and creating a “fleeting eternity” that begins and ends in an instant, often imperceptible within the larger video. Within these brief loops, subjects repeat the same motion countless times. Like performers of ephemeral gestures, they prove their existence through the endless repetition of movement.
The body is built to stand the ground and move against gravity. All living things move; ranging from tiny motions, (as visible in the artwork) like rolling the eyes in every direction to survey the surroundings (2021), to larger actions, like tumbling down a hill carrying a giant snowball (2021), which involves mass and momentum.
In language, verbs describe motion or action. They narrate the subject of a sentence, bringing it to life. The character 動 (dong, “move”) express physical states; moving, shifting, shaking, starting, but also implies psychological states, such as disturbance, feeling, or responsiveness.
The exhibition title: TURN. SWITCH. JUMP! translates the rhythm of matter in Lee Eun’s work into the cadence of language. The titles of individual works, like the exhibition name, use exclamations to convey innate sensations: surprise, feeling, call, response. These reflect both the mood or intent of the painted subjects and Lee Eun’s working process: continuously collecting GIFs floating in the digital world, choosing ones that resonate with her current state or feelings to inspire her work.
Like exclamations that express emotions directly without relying on other words, the artist signals her recent shift in practice: turning (turn) her approach, hiding previous works behind canvases (switch), and preparing to leap forward again (jump).
The subjects Lee chooses for her paintings are familiar to her and harmless, both emotionally and physically. They are objects or figures she can keep close and encounter often. Her works draw out instinctive situations or suppressed impulses; things she cannot express in the real world, through the actions and phrases of GIF subjects. The reasons behind the subjects’ repeated actions or their circumstances are left in the background. What matters is that they keep moving.
By watching “moving images”, the artist brings these animated subjects to life on the canvas. When paint filtered through her body touches the canvas, previously untouchable beings are finally brought into reality. The motion of these figures, seemingly leaping from the monitor, produces a visible sound. Their gestures gain physicality through rough marks scratched into the canvas before the paint dries and through direct gestures left by the artist using conté.
Treating the canvas as a screen, she layers images or lets subjects traverse the left and right edges, creating a sense of time. Her material choices and rearrangement of the canvas reinvent space and time within the painting. In this way, she provides these subjects, who live in their short repeating lives, with a place to move or linger.
GIFs clearly illustrate how we consume images today. The nationwide spread of wireless internet moved us from encyclopedias, where related information was linked in continuous categories, to a system where typing a word into a box and clicking retrieves individual pieces of information. This evolved into blogs, combining text and photos in a vertical scroll on a PC monitor. More recently, the explosion of social media platforms like KakaoTalk and Instagram has accelerated the everyday use of GIFs, offering small, entertaining moments for fast information seekers or for filling idle time.
In a world made socially difficult by pandemics, where reading each other’s emotions in person is challenging, people share feelings and situations online, often responding with GIF highlights. This reflects a broader shift from vertical scrolling (reading) to horizontal navigation of video play bars; a glimpse into our evolving media habits. The digital world builds an ever-firmer foundation under our feet, independent of the physical world, with videos uploaded every few seconds. Within this flow, GIFs endlessly repeat scenes and episodes not labeled as important.
The subjects Lee Eun chooses for her canvas do no harm; they quietly perform their roles. They move on their own, revealing the circumstances that led to their actions in short, self-contained sequences. Their eternal motion and repeated gestures never reach a final point; they show no overt goal-directed behaviour. They simply traverse the canvas endlessly, living and moving boldly, often before the viewer even realises where they began, or where they might go.
