Han Suhee

The Most Intimate Way to Remember Nature – "Walking through mountains and fields, leaving traces with dots." The paintings of Han Soohee go beyond mere visual representation. They are a persistent attempt to grasp invisible elements such as time, memory, and emotion—deeply embedded within life itself—through the most personal and intimate means. Her work is a quiet yet resolute expression of philosophical reflection on existence, visualized through the simplest and most fundamental mark: the dot. On a single canvas, Han patiently places thousands, even tens of thousands, of dots. Through this act, she gently and continuously unravels fragments of memories and emotions layered deep within her. For the artist, the dot is not just a compositional element, but a tactile tool to hold onto fading memories, to soothe raw emotions, and to resist the quiet erosion of time. It is a gesture of documentation—a soft defiance against forgetfulness. The repetitive act of dotting transcends technique. It becomes a bodily language that seeks to "hold onto" what is disappearing—scattered memories, fading feelings, and unreachable presences. This slow and meditative rhythm invites the viewer to pause—not just to see the whole, but to become absorbed in a single dot, where the vibration of the artist’s emotion reverberates. Through this, one is led to recall personal memories and recover long-forgotten sensations. Each work becomes both a window and a mirror for the viewer’s own emotional memory. As a long-time presenter of the documentary series Hwacheop Gihaeng (Painting Journey) on TJB (Daejeon SBS), Han has spent over 15 years walking across more than 100 regions of Korea. Through these journeys, she has quietly collected and archived emotional traces left within the landscape. Sometimes those memories remain scattered, sometimes they coalesce into a narrative. They may belong to her, to others, or to a specific moment in time. These dotted traces are not attempts to reproduce the external world or mimic a faithful image, but rather to recompose emotional fragments into poetic residues—mental images formed where sense and feeling converge. Early in her practice, Han encountered the form of the dot naturally and initially used it within figurative and narrative frameworks. But over time, she began to strip away overt imagery, turning her focus to rhythm, sensation, and repetition itself. Through this transition, she discovered the latent potential of the dot as a structural and emotional device. The repetitive motion of her hand became an embodied language, a physical form of memory. This daily gesture became a ritual—an act of reconstruction, and a quiet declaration of resistance against what disappears. The process of painting became like stitching torn emotions together, a form of healing through which the voids and anxieties left by time are gently filled. It is in this space between intuition and intellect, body and thought, that Han organizes her emotions and, through her work, softly reaches out to others. Her paintings serve as emotional conversations—between herself and the viewer, between past and present, between presence and absence. On that path, when the cold wind brushes against your face, when the sound of insects echoes in the stillness, when the darkness of night feels unfamiliar and overwhelming—you may find yourself stopping before one of her works. That moment becomes like the starlight we quietly gather each night, or like a silent prayer that gives you the courage to rise again at dawn. And each of those tiny dots, each flicker of light, becomes a star within your heart—carrying hope, imagination, freedom, and longing—lingering quietly by your side.