Dream is a cloud. It’s a floating cloud. We face the cloud now but it will float away soon and it changes its shape many times in a day. Things and the world we see in a dream is a cloud like that. We sometimes tremble in fear, feel happiness, weep for sorrow in a dream but all that just amount to weep and smile in front of a floating cloud. What we can see in Suk Chul-joo’s is also a cloud. Mongyudowondo is famous for the anecdote that it was painted by An Gyeon according to the dream of Anpyeong Daegun in which the prince strolledalong the beautiful Peach Blossom Land. Anpyeong Daegun thus wanted to vividly revive his dream in reality. He wanted to touch the rock of the mountain with his bare hands and see the water of the valley with his bare eyes. Suk Chul-joo’s serial paintings, executed keeping the ancestor’s endeavor in mind, are returning on and on the Peach Blossom Landto a dream, to a shape of a cloud. In Suk Chul-joo’s painting, the mountains and valleys and tree sat which hermits strolled along, are gathered in the shape of clouds and dispersed away like the clouds. His painting clearly shows that all vivid reality amount to just a cloud. Returning a thing, which was originally a cloud, to a cloud; that’s Suk Chul-joo’s The technical aspect of Suk Chul-joo’s is the same as that of his 2001 solo exhibition; he adopted a ‘method of wiping off’ in which he painted a color and wiped it off before it dries. The process of ‘wiping of method’ is like this. The artist paints the background of canvas black or white or other primary colors at first. When the first background dries, he paints the background once again with contrasting colors to the original ones. Before the second background color dries, he paint an object with a brush soaked with water; after that he makes swift dry brush strokes many times. Then through the interaction between water and dry brush strokes, a dim silhouette of the object is appeared against the ground. It is the artist himself who intended the basic formation of an object, but it is nature that renders the unexpected effect by the interaction between water and brush.
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