Wherever the mind dwells apart is itself a distant place. Picking chrysanthemums at my east fence, I see South Mountain far off: air lovely at dusk, birds in flight heading home. All this means something, something absolute: whenever I start to explain it, I forget words altogether. -Tao Chien Helen J Gallery is excited to present Endless, Nameless – a two-person exhibition of works by painters Han Sungwoo and Yoon Jongju, opening December 9th, 2023. A thermometer and hygrometer display the air’s temperature and humidity inside Yoon Jongju’s studio in Daegu. Her paintings are, in their own way, also records of their environment. As Yoon pours washes of acrylic pigment over her canvases, layers set and congeal according to each atmospheric shift. She arrives at “colors that exist in the world but have no name” -- airy expanses independent of the numbers and measurements of meteorological instruments or established vocabulary. Han Sungwoo’s oil paintings have arrived at a parallel conclusion. Like Yoon’s works, Han’s works are documentations of processes and phases, with traces of buried colors and arduous brushwork locked into the oil’s course strata. Observations of marginal landscapes and their inhabitants have led Han to “the backstage of the stage” – his term for life’s scenes and experiences that otherwise escape notice. “This ‘outside,’” he explains, “is something that cannot be captured within existing languages.” The grayscale Pomegranate Tree offers a lone foil to the exhibition’s persistent abstraction. While Han’s layers accrue like sedimentary gradations, Yoon arranges her works in sequences and grids, evidence of a shared fixation with time’s undeniable and immaterial presence. Lao Zu, the historied Daoist philosopher, insisted that “the name that can be spoken is not the eternal name.” Phrased differently: endless, nameless experiences are the domain of abstraction. Accordingly, Han and Yoon’s compositions turn daily observations into something absolute.