This study aims to analyze and organize how affect is visually
manifested in painting, building on my own artworks created between
2022 and 2024 that express various emotions condensed into the
theme of love. In addition, it explores the contemporary ...
This study aims to analyze and organize how affect is visually
manifested in painting, building on my own artworks created between
2022 and 2024 that express various emotions condensed into the
theme of love. In addition, it explores the contemporary potential of
traditional East Asian painting techniques through organization of
layered coloring methods using traditional pigments and materials.
This thesis approaches love as a particular mode of affect. For
the artist, love is the most intricate dimension of life, shaping how
the world is perceived and interpreted. Rather than treating love as
romantic or traditional, the study presents it as a phenomenon that
arises through encounters with others and extends beyond private
emotions toward solidarity and resonance. Through analysis of my
paintings, the study examines how such affective qualities are
visualized. Affect can be understood not as a fixed emotion or object but
as a flowing, transformative force with latent potential. It emerges in
the process of mutual interaction between bodies and intensifies as
the scope of sensation expands. Love, generated through interpersonal
contact, displays affective characteristics as it undergoes doubling—
where emotional layers become more complex and the self–other
relationship extends into a shared “we.” Doubling refers to not only
directly felt sensations but also deeper layers such as memory and
habit that accumulate through experience.
To theorize how affect can be expressed in painting, this
research first reviews the genealogy of affect theory spanning from
Spinoza to Deleuze and Massumi, with particular emphasis on Brian
Massumi, who systematically reinterpreted affect in a contemporary
framework. While affect has been actively discussed in politics and
literature, its role in art remains relatively unexplored. Therefore, this
study also references the perspectives of Korean critics and theorists
on ‘affective expression’. Also, this study examines contemporary
Korean painters to assess how affect can be articulated in
two-dimensional painting as both temporal and spatial experience.
Because love is deeply connected to private emotion, this thesis
investigates how affect arises, doubles, and resonates through
intimate relationships, drawing from personal experience. Love
assumes the existence of the other and is triggered by encounters,
forming reciprocal affective flows. As Erich Fromm described love as
both passive and active practice, it lies in line with Massumi’s idea
of "to affect and be affected." Love intensifies through sustained
interaction, forming a complex constellation of emotions, echoing
Roland Barthes’s view of love not as a singular feeling but as a composite of joy, absence, yearning, and sorrow.
Love is understood as an invisible flow of force; thus, the
moment of sensing love remains as an impression or atmosphere
rather than a concrete scene. To visually convey this, my works
avoid symbolic or narrative representation but instead seek to express
the mood through ambiguous forms, emphasizing intuitive sensation.
This approach is discussed through Deleuze’s concept of "painting
sensation," which transcends figuration and abstraction to visualize
invisible intensities and imbue the image with movement and vitality.
Through this, the study explores how painting on a flat surface can
become a tactile space that evokes time and spatiality.
The pictorial expression of affect operates in an “inform” state
as potential images. My works are only completed when the viewer
faces the painting, senses the image, and brings their own memories
and emotions into play. The process of creating potential images
begins with selecting old photographs and digitally altering their
contours into blurred forms. These fragmentary memories are
materialized through endless lines—rendered not only as outlines but
as brushstrokes of color that carry affective energy and motion. The
colors are built through juxtaposed layering (simultaneous contrast),
where non-identical pigments blend optically on the viewer’s retina.
These non-identical, layered strokes function as a painterly
mechanism of affect, activating viewer response and forming potential
images through bodily encounter.