The Meaning of the Sun

I’ve always been interested in thinking about the collections of museums. Historically, for many centuries, artists copied the work of other artists to train. And I think painters, in particular, are obsessed with the past, with asking themselves: How can I enter into some sort of conversation with artists who came before me? It’s the idea of creating a space where time is more elastic, making work that’s not quite in the present, not quite in the past. In the sciences, for example, you’d never say, “Oh, let me go to a dentist from the 17th century. It will be much better!” But in the arts, those models of “progress” don’t really apply. When I first visited Korea and thought about working with objects from a historical collection, it was a very different experience from what I’ve done with European models. June Young Kwak, head of exhibitions at Leeum and Hoam Museum of Art, would tell me if what I was curating into my show, basically because it chimed with my own interests, was too obvious. She’d say: “Every Westerner likes that piece, but for our visitors here, it’s just not going to be very compelling.” So she’d push me to find pieces that expanded my thinking. One result of that process was a reminder of something that’s important to me. In Korean art, for example, and in Chinese art, symbolism of nature is central. You don’t paint a tree without knowing it’s a clear symbol of, let’s say, longevity. Modernism broke with that. A tree for Mondrian was structure, pure formalism. But that’s never how I’ve thought about the subjects I paint. I don’t paint the shape of the sun just because it’s a circle. I believe in the symbolism of it all, the sun and the sunset, the meaning of the natural world.

—As told to Randy Kennedy