Idling Conversations 

Idling Conversations is a series of my attempts in liberating art from its fate as a communicative medium through a conceptually-driven painting practice. 

Art, admittedly, panders to the penchant of a capitalist society, which demands professionalism and efficiency. Subsumed under the social context and its expectations for art; to effectively deliver rich information, it constantly exposes itself to the dangers of becoming mere replications of existing and already circulating ideas and objects. To create a collective nothing - in terms of communicational outcomes - leaving just the vacant yet testimonial activations of paintings, is the only autonomous act I can dare to achieve. 

The work employs broken and dismantled visual languages in painting, borrowing from discourses of abstraction. Crystallized images with unfit and misleading use of visual languages are then activated into a state of flux as they generate relationships with other images that coexist in the installation. The revolvency and repetition, however, persist to question; how would one work be NOT cohesive, without being cohesive about just that? 

Idling Conversations encounters inevitable failures throughout its chronicled endeavors. However, a newly found constraint always births the next endeavor. The impossibility of the act becomes what self-sufficiently and obstinately facilitates my art practice. My work is thus a form and conceptual experiment destined to fail. Yet, only through the tunnels of despair, there is a pathway of hope. 

Idling Conversations is truthfully the pitiful fruit of our constraints. Only the constraint facilitates the ever-failing, yet ever-shifting, Idling Conversations.

- Jimin Yi Baek