From ancient history, humans have drawn pictures. From ancient to modern humans, we have expressed ourselves throughout painting, perhaps even prior to language. When we look this art, we can see individual patterns. When observing material, a person or a moment, people observe, acknowledge and express ideas about an object throughout their own experience. This causes them to self-examine. Especially, painting requires more time to truly appreciate in observation, because it is representative. When painting while observing a picture, people create images after careful observation, to recreate in some way the image in the picture. Throughout this artistic process, people discover much that can be disregarded or ignored. Paintings composed of discoveries made during an observation period can convey numerous decisions made by the artist, as painting transfers a three-dimensional world onto two dimensions. It conventionalizes and interprets the objects it represents. The many layers in water color paintings, ink layers in engraving, and the streams of time built into a portrait are the results of collected observations by the artist. Artists express these impressions by observing objects enthusiastically overtime. Because artists are able to do this, paintings make us see through the world better.

Though it is a finished surface when we see a completed drawing, its process of creation requires layers of endless reiteration. The process crystalizes the labor and time of the artist. It also makes us rediscover the objects, people, and moments that we thought we understood, and those that we recognize well in our daily lives. A painting is the result of a performance, an endeavor of time by the artist, and the emotions that people feel, intuitively, emanating from masterpieces are auras indicating the presence of that time and labor. As David Hockney once mentioned, the desire for drawing resides deep inside of us. We can recognize it by watching children, when they draw pictures. Even though most of the people have lost these desires as they age, some people cherish them and never lose them. Collections in 《Painting》 are masterpieces of artists who have preserved and revealed the desire to draw hidden deep inside of us. We’d like you to patiently and carefully meet these paintings that have preserved the objects observed by the artists throughout their labors. We do hope you to have time to rediscover the world more and see how layers have been added to this expressive existence.