SHINCHON CROSSROADS 2
If you are ever asked to go from black and white to color, here is what you should do. Contemplate why you’re doing black and white, and then think of the possibilities of color. Come up with some numbers and figures, and if the equation you put together shows a marked improvement in change, you better be sure that is what you want before you make the leap, because there is no going back.
In my case, my colleagues had secured an exhibition space at a well-respected commercial art gallery in a coveted neighborhood of Seoul, Korea. These were high stakes we were playing with, and anything less than a stellar job would have been unacceptable. I was being given ideas of how to make my gray pictures pop, how I could overlay sheets of color transparency over the black and white drawings, and I felt like I was being pushed into a corner I didn’t want to be in.
Complacent in my black and white world, I had been convinced that I would never need to work with color again. However, the show was a big event, and the push to do my best allowed for unforeseen solutions. Ultimately, I don’t know what the show did for the others. (I wasn’t even there when it opened; I had returned to the US to get married.) I’ve heard here and there a string of gossip and loose stories about what the show did for such and such, how success was soon followed by calamity, how friendships were broken, how a couple of fellow exhibitors vowed never to do another group show again. It all sounded very exciting, and I was thrilled to be part of this grand, tragic thing, but in the end, it did next to nothing for my own career. All I got out of it was a new direction in my art that I would have never foreseen. Good or bad, change had arrived, and I was suddenly accepting it with open arms.
I don’t regret caving in for the group, but I do think these things come at a price.
