Piece Description
Medium: Watercolor
Dimensions: 3 ft by 6”
Bruises are remnants of pain—the punishment one endures and remembers. As a Korean-American, growing up bruises were not an uncommon experience, especially for a rambunctious child like I was. Acting up and causing trouble was swiftly punished with the nearest house object around: a shoe horn, back scratcher, and most popularly a chopstick. I used to bawl and wail about the unfairness of such punishments and would see the bruises as reminders and lessons of my actions and their resulting consequences. However, now when I look back on such moments I see through the naivety of how I thought then, and realized that I only got these punishments because I was loved by people like my parents who cared enough to see to the corrections of my wrongdoings. In this piece I attempt to capture the underlying beauty of bruises and the love and care it embodies that goes beyond its negative implications. I do so through painting bruises with an assortment of colors ranging from red to brown to yellow with a focus on detail to most accurately portray the injury. The paintings are arranged in a straight line and in a minimalist abstract fashion to show how in a modern world bruises, and the acts that cause them, are perceived as straight forward, however in my experience, the meaning behind them is not and that is shown through the careful selection of colors and the care of the designs put into the bruises themselves.
