Palimpsest: Overwriting

Palimpsest: Overwriting. Nothing is entirely new. Fiction is a kind of truth. Jin Minwook, who collects landscapes and old sentences and weaves memory and imagination into new scenes, presents the solo exhibition Palimpsest: Overwriting at 021 Gallery from September 11 to December 2. This is the artist’s 2nd solo exhibition at 021 Gallery following Sosogyeong in 2019, presenting around 20 new works centred on the expanding practices of walking and copying poetry. Jin has long observed and collected everyday landscapes through walking. The Seeing While Walking (Sosogyeong) project, begun in 2017, started with one tree and small landscapes around the studio before expanding into wider places and stories. More recently, reading and copying old poems and sentences has added another process: encountered landscapes, memory and literary imagination intersect within one painting, deepening the work. A palimpsest is one surface on which earlier writing is erased and new writing added, leaving old traces and new records overlapping. In The Tender Narrator, Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk explains the creation of literary worlds through the example of British poet William Wordsworth’s The Prelude. She sees the world as a vast fabric, attending to literary imagination and the bonds that reconnect its fragmented pieces. The passage directly quoted in the work—‘Because I gave a moral life to each natural thing, to rocks and fruit, flowers and even stones lying by the roadside, I saw them feel’—shares this perspective. For the artist, landscape is not one complete scene before the eyes, but a place continually overlaid with accumulated time and stories and someone’s memories and emotions. Here, the artist moves beyond the personal experience of walking through everyday places into active field visits, researching and travelling to settings found in literature. Over the past 2 years, the artist has used classical songs as principal texts, walking through the places where their stories unfold and observing and collecting present landscapes and traces of events. Old poetry and literature from East and West also bring other periods’ ways of seeing and remembering nature into contact with the artist’s own experience. Collected landscapes and sentences are not reproduced literally. What was seen, remembered, read and imagined permeates the work, returning as new landscapes on the boundary between reality and fiction. Just as memories sharpen some scenes and blur others, different times and images overlap, disappear and re-emerge in the paintings. Alongside this expanding narrative, the exhibition shows changes in Jin’s painting. Working from traditional painting, the artist explores materials and the possibilities of extending painting to contain today’s landscapes and sensations, rather than repeating familiar materials and forms. New works including Prelude (2026), Asking the Skylark for Directions (2026) and Bonds (2025) begin with old sentences but meet the present time of the artist’s own walks and experiences to unfold as one more new scene. Jin studied Oriental painting at Ewha Womans University and subsequently at China’s Central Academy of Fine Arts and Ewha’s graduate school. Solo exhibitions include The Path Walked Yesterday (Hanwon Museum of Art, 2022), Unfolding and Deepening (Youngeun Museum of Contemporary Art, 2023) and Fragile Dialogue (Tong-in Gallery, 2024). The artist also participated in the 24th SongEun Art Award exhibition in 2024 and continues an active practice. Palimpsest: Overwriting begins with Jin’s approach of rereading, walking and looking at what already exists. Old stories and present landscapes, reality and imagination, memory and emotion leave multiple layers of traces on one surface instead of erasing each other. The artist thus brings the past back into the present, making one more unwritten story within familiar landscapes.