Me and the Caterpillar II

Me and the Caterpillar II is a work from the Me and the Caterpillar series, which takes old photographs preserved in the artist’s family album as its point of departure, exploring the structure of painting and the distance between memory and image.

The photographs depict events and people that certainly once existed, yet they are scarcely connected to the artist’s own memory. Images that “remain as photographs but lack a tangible sense as memory” are also referenced in this work.

In this piece, a strong contrast is established between the “figure” placed at the center of the composition and the frame-like “ground” surrounding it, painted with acrylic gouache. The fabric support is dyed by the artist’s own hand and treated with dosa to fix the drawing materials. The forms are rendered in transparent watercolor, with only minimal information intentionally retained on the surface.

This process reverses the conventional procedure through which a painting accumulates toward a completed image, instead holding the unstable state before the image becomes fixed. The forms extracted from photographs do not function to explain specific narratives or emotions, but rather operate as traces of an ambiguous presence drifting between memory and record.

Me and the Caterpillar II is an attempt to gradually shift the distance between the “self” and the “image” through the repetition of this structure within the series, continuing to question how images can be translated into material form.