The sound of a door opening and closing, two sets of footsteps, the everyday murmur of someone lightly complaining and making excuses drew nearer. And from the end of the corridor the teacher appeared with him.
“Come in. It’s good to meet you.”
You’re taller than I expected from the photos... That was the only stupid thought I could manage. I couldn’t believe this was happening, and I couldn’t take my eyes off her until she came up to me and offered a handshake. Worried it might look rude, I quickly lowered my gaze and took the hand she held out.
It was thin, slight, neat, and warm.
“Awi told me and I’ve been waiting.”
Pointing a thumb back toward him standing a step behind, the teacher then turned her upper body and actually looked back at him.
“Oh right, do they call you Kun in Korea?”
He shrugged with his hands shoved into his jeans pockets as if it didn’t matter what anyone called him. The two of them seemed far closer than I had expected.
“In Hong Kong we take a character from a name and put ‘Ah’ in front to make a nickname.”
The teacher turned back to me to explain.
A little curiosity I hadn’t meant to voice loosened somewhere inside me.
Most people called him Kun, but I remembered at the VIP event Shushu had used something else. It had definitely been “Awi.”
If they’d spent their school years together in Hong Kong, calling him by a Hong Kong-style nickname wouldn’t be strange. It might not be a showy private pet name signaling something special—lover or anything like that.
“Art fairs are tough, right? Chaotic. You’re working hard.”
Encouraging, the teacher lightly held my arm. The mood felt friendly, like we were people who always chatted like this whenever we met here. There was none of the guardedness, nerves, or quirky crankiness you sometimes sense from masters.
“By the way, Shushu’s work keeps getting better. I saw an article here in an art magazine covering the ‘body to soul’ show—read it with interest.”
“We signed an exhibition contract with a gallery in Chicago today. All the Shushu pieces Phantom brought to the fair are going to Chicago. Once they’re on the wall in Chicago, sales are only a matter of time.”
Until then he’d only been fiddling with the camera hanging from his neck, standing a step back from the conversation; now he leaned a hip against the table and spoke. His tone wasn’t giddy, but he didn’t try to hide the faint smile at the corner of his mouth.
Maybe it was the collared tee with jeans and loafers, but he looked much more casual and younger than usual today. His posture was looser than when he wore a suit, and the small camera at his neck—toy-like against his build—added to the effect.
“Quite confident.”
The teacher pulled a playful face toward me, teasing him.
“The work’s getting more and more of an East-Asian feel, so they’ll probably go wild over there. If we have her pop in for the opening, it’ll stir even more buzz. A few interviews would be better still.”
What he said surprised me.
I knew he stood in a dealer’s position, unable to judge work purely by aesthetic value, and as an owner he could be a businessman so coolheaded in marketing that it almost felt excessive. Even so, for some reason I had assumed Shushu would be an exception.
Using an artist’s attractive looks or extra-pictorial elements to generate buzz was, for him, no more than a tactic to raise her renown and the value of the work; it didn’t mean he treated her work as a means instead of an end. There was no doubt he cherished Shushu’s work. And yet, his comment startled me.
“Goodness, still aggressive with the marketing.”
Again the teacher widened her eyes slightly toward me, as if to seek agreement, while giving the slightest shake of the head. I could tell she didn’t one hundred percent approve of his approach, but she didn’t push into outright objection.
“We can’t just stand here forever... and I’m not much of a talker, so I don’t have much good to say, really. If you like, do you want to take your time and look around the studio?”
She clapped her hands softly to draw our attention. At the unexpected offer I reflexively looked to {N•o•v•e•l•i•g•h•t} him. He gave a little nod that said it was fine.
“...It would be an honor.”
“Honor is a bit much.”
She laughed and tapped my shoulder.
Leaving him in the hall, unadorned by a single plant or painting, the teacher and I headed down the corridor where she and he had appeared a moment ago. My heart stung with nerves and excitement, but the teacher opened her studio without a moment’s hesitation, as if she were letting an old friend in at the door.
Like the hall, the studio was all white, but as a place for painting, natural traces of hands and ink remained here and there.
I didn’t know much about art history or the lineages of painters, but that didn’t apply to the teacher.
Over a long career of many styles, she had, about three years ago, devoted herself exclusively to orthodox East-Asian painting in ink. Thanks to that, a weighty scent of ink filled the studio.
It was hard to guess what it meant for a professional painter—recognized as a master—to open a studio like this. But I still remembered the jealous kind of alienation the shared studio had stirred in me when I was small.
That space where my mother drew comics and my father painted in oils felt like a secret realm only the two of them could share and fully understand.
In the living room or at the dining table, they were my parents and I could feel very close to them, but the moment they went into the studio, I felt excluded from their world, and as a child that made me anxious.
It was wholly theirs, and more than a space.
Every artist feels differently about a studio, but for painters who melt themselves into their work, it is at least a place to face oneself. So private that calling it private feels insufficient. The simple fact that I had set foot in that inner room of hers was already special.
The sense that this was Hong Kong lost all meaning. Now that I thought of it, the street noise that had been so rowdy was perfectly cut off.
“Not much to see, right? I don’t really work with a variety of materials, so... this is just how I work.”
Coffee, is that okay?—she asked, handing me a mug. I thanked her and took it.
“I should have given you iced? At this temperature iced lowers your body heat, so I always stick to it hot.”
“No. Thank you, this is perfect.”
In the room, where a ceiling unit was running gently, the scent of coffee braided into the ink. Sipping carefully, I kept looking around.
If finished works were kept in another room, then here the only paintings were a large landscape that looked to be in progress and, on the opposite wall, a portrait.
Even if a dragon hides its head by wrapping itself around Mount Tai, a dragon is still a dragon.
Even unfinished, her landscape was overwhelming. Only a master who has melted slivers of bone and flesh into paintings for a lifetime can, without swagger or bluff, carry into a work such expansive nerve and, at the same time, a magnanimity broad enough to hold the world; the moment I stepped in, gooseflesh ran over me.
Strangely, though, what tugged at me more right now was the picture on the sofa opposite.
A portrait painted with colored ink in a watercolor manner, its lines blurred at the edges like a child’s drawing, innocent. But unmistakably the teacher’s work.
“Do you like it?”
Sensing my gaze, the teacher looked back at the picture and asked. I nodded, cupping the mug in both hands to feel its warmth.
“I thought I knew almost all your work... but I’ve never seen this one.”
My lips trembled a little as I answered.
The teacher set her mug on the table in front of the sofa and lifted the picture from the wall. Maybe around tabloid size. Not that large.
“Take it.”
“......”
I was too shocked to react. I stared at her with my eyes wide.
“Oh, no. Really, no. I can’t.”
Coming to my senses, I set my mug on the table and waved my hands in protest. Against my will, the monetary value of her work flashed through my head. I hated to put it this way, but... I couldn’t accept so costly a gift.
Carrying the piece to the shelf by the window, the teacher spoke.
“You’re not good with words either, are you, Ihyeon.”
“......”
Caught from an angle I hadn’t expected, my steps stalled as I moved to follow. She wasn’t talking about small talk or sociability. She meant the language most comfortable to me—something a person meeting me for the first time couldn’t know.
“I’m the same. So think of this as a letter or a card I’m giving you, and accept it.”
My mouth only opened and closed, soundless.
“But... I really can’t....”
I muttered with my arms hanging at my sides. Not painting right now, I felt even less entitled to accept it.
She set the picture on the shelf and turned back to me.
“That picture.”
“......”
“To Awi, was a consolation.”
“......”
Once because she remembered .
Again because what that picture meant to him was consolation.
That one brief sentence from the teacher set me reeling.
Did you like that picture, ? That night I had asked him.
“Shall I make you forget everything?” he had said as he climbed onto the bed—that was his answer.
I hadn’t refused him, and at the peak of pleasure, as if my blurred, melting brain were being stirred, I was able to sink, just as he’d said, into a deep sleep and forget everything.
If that profound rest was the answer he wanted to give me, I could take it to mean he liked the picture. But that was only my conjecture.
I hadn’t expected to hear the exact answer—spoken—here, from the teacher.
“Awi grew up seeing a lot of great work, and as a gallery owner and a private collector he owns paintings of real value, but the piece that shook him most so far is probably .”
Leaning back against the shelf behind her, the teacher folded her arms around herself.
“When went out into the world as the Hong Kong edition cover of a famous novelist, he was so displeased by the fact he had to share that picture with others—even in that form—that he kept bristling about it... He wanted that picture to exist only for him, to that obsessive degree.”
It was unbelievable. For me—already straining to hold myself together just to meet the teacher—this was more than I could process. And yet I couldn’t stop listening.
“You cried out your feelings to the world, and people who speak the same language understood and responded. Awi doesn’t paint, but he is more sensitive than anyone to the language inside a picture. That’s probably why he’s doing gallery work now. Sometimes he pretends he looks only at economic value.”
At that she let out a small laugh. The relaxed curve of her mouth overlapped with his, somehow.
Her eyes, which had been angled down toward the floor, came back to me.
“At least for one person, your painting functioned as a language that could be understood. It gave the sense that a person who feels alienation for reasons that aren’t universal—that no one, not even family... not even parents... can give—was not alone. A sympathy for ‘alienation.’”
A sympathy for alienation.
That was what I had felt in the teacher’s judge’s commentary.
Under parents who were a couple in a good relationship and understanding as mother and father, I had to be a perfectly happy child. Many people around me, even my friends, talked as if that were my obligation.
It’s not that I didn’t love them. On the contrary, they were the most precious to me, and I loved them, and until the accident I wasn’t very outgoing and they were, for all intents and purposes, my closest friends.
I was happy. Only, it wasn’t the kind of perfect happiness people tried to force on me. I don’t know if perfect happiness even exists, and if it does I don’t know what form it takes.
For my mother, my father was first; for my father, my mother was first. They absolutely needed each other to live as themselves. Sometimes I simply envied friends whose parents lived for their children. Sometimes, only sometimes.
Between them there was a bond I could never wedge myself into. And that was probably... the most important thing in their lives. They were people who spoke the same language, and only two people in the world spoke that language.
Alienation felt for reasons that aren’t universal is something no one understands. So I drew it.
Through that picture, someone other than the teacher shared the same feeling... and the fact that the person was him, Lau Weikun—suddenly, it felt like the final destination waiting at the end of every step I had taken.
For reasons I couldn’t clearly explain, a hot dampness gathered behind my eyes. I don’t know. Right now I can only say I don’t know why. My arm, which had been hanging down,
