Take My Eyes Off is an exhibition that examines painting—entangled in a turbulent affair with ‘vision’ and ‘image’—and highlights the strategies of contemporary painting. The exhibition presents contemporary painting that responds to today’s image-saturated visual environment and seeks a new ‘visuality,’ using the motif of the ‘eye’ to reveal painting’s potential as a site of practice. Framed by the Seoul Museum of Art’s 2025 agenda of ‘Action’ and featured as part of Buk-Seoul Museum of Art’s special theme, ‘Countermoves of Painting,’ Take My Eyes Off seeks to reexamine contemporary painting and invite social and cultural reflection through painting.

Painting is a visual art form that uses color and line to create shapes on a two-dimensional surface such as canvas or paper. Bound by its flat, motionless surface and the expectation that it presents an image that is either beautiful or pleasing to look at, painting was long regarded as a static form—an art without a future. Its close relationship with vision once made it a tool for reinforcing visual centrism. But this visual centrism, long upheld through painting, began to unravel as we came to understand that we see with two eyes, not one—and that each eye sees differently. Freed from the logic of a fixed point of view, painting briefly emerged as a provocative medium for doubt and experimentation. But the moment was short-lived.

As we move through the digital age, a new form of visual centrism has emerged. We understand reality more through images than ever before. Images are no longer confined to the virtual—they actively intervene in the real world and shape how we live. We can’t escape them, and it’s hard to imagine our eyes (vision) without them. Our eyes are stuck to images. As images surge ahead, painting is often seen as having lost its purpose—or perhaps a role it was never expected to play. Yet, as art historian David Joselit has declared, painting remains a “live medium”—a form constantly entangled with the present, always unfolding “on the air.” Contemporary painting actively engages with the logic of images as they circulate and are consumed in the digital age, renewing itself in the process. It’s not the end—it’s a new springboard.

Here, painting once again activates doubt. It exposes how images shape and collide with our vision, and it confronts their paradoxical nature—alive yet dead, powerful yet impoverished. Unlike photography or video, which are bound to time and its manipulations, painting holds images in simultaneous and overlapping layers, unconstrained by duration. This way of operating strips images of their conventional or assumed narratives. Painting cannot be synonymous with image. Though it may appear to grasp the image, painting holds the potential to play with its subjects and contexts. It moves and awakens the eyes bound to the image, urging us to imagine a path forward—not a closed ending. Painting is no longer a flat image hanging on a wall, nor merely something pleasing to the eye—it is a simultaneous stage that constantly throws our vision into motion.

Take My Eyes Off presents the story of painting pushing against its own limits—focusing on contemporary works that shake our vision loose from the images it clings to. Eight painters explore perceptual and cognitive shifts, working at the intersection of image and vision. Their works give form to the strategies of contemporary painting and point toward a narrative that remains “on the air.” Structured in four parts, the exhibition unfolds like a film or drama. And it begins with this: our eyes tremble. And then—they take off.

To see—“I see”—may be grounded in a fundamental misunderstanding. In both virtual and physical spaces, we are flooded with image-based information that appears instantly knowable, yet rarely reveals its truth. Still, we absorb these images at speed. The eyes, key organs of perception, link vision to cognition, shaping how we think and forming our worldview. But what if what we see isn’t the whole story? Miryu Yoon, Eunsae Lee, and Yebin Chang pose this question through painting. The images they bring detach from familiar contexts and strike the eye. We cannot easily tell what we’re looking at. Faced with this ambiguity, our eyes begin to search for other narratives. The social and conceptual meanings we summon collide with these distorted images, leading us into a maze. And in that moment, painting whispers: “Question what you think you see.”

Images are the world, and the world is made of images. And yet, we find ourselves that be excluded from the world—or perhaps already caught in it. The cave in Plato’s old analogy may seem preferable: worn and outdated, yes, but at least it offered a way out. Let’s try pulling an image from this world, woven tight like a spider’s web. The image is so thin, its hollow fragility exposed. It slips away like sand that can’t be held. Scattered like a puzzle in disarray, perhaps it is from this collapse that we can begin again. The second part of the exhibition, Draw ( ) and Drop ( ), presents painting strategies that work through the image. Yeongbin Yoon moves in close to images too immediate to avoid, faithfully echoing their looseness. Hyerim Jun explores new temporality and spatiality through idealized images. MeeNa Park plays with externally given images, questioning the idea of a ‘finished structure.’ These tactics draw the image into painting and expose the frameworks and fractures it holds within. It is the moment when the seemingly solid world of images begins to give way. This reflection on the image is what revives painting in its moment of fatigue—and perhaps revives us too, caught in the web.

Is the tragic present of the eyes—tethered to images—our destined future? Contemporary painting seems to resist that notion. The questions painting raises today are not mere lamentations over a ‘lack of hope,’ but starting points for expectation and astonishment—for a ‘holy moly’ astonishment yet to come. Our eyes are already sensing discomfort, even if they remain fixated on screens for now. Images are the world, and the eyes are the body we cannot cast off. In this condition, painting begins to search for what cannot be seen. It offers a new ground—one where the eye may break away from both image and vision. Suejin Chung seeks to understand the visible world by visualizing the invisible consciousness through painting. Rahm Parc proposes a practice of seeing and moving with the mind, in order to escape the limitations of today’s ‘visual’ environments. The eye, detached from the ‘visible’ conditions we now stand on, has begun to work in active alliance with what is unseen—consciousness, mind. This is not a return to some transcendent eye, but the stirring of sense and thought toward the world. “The eye has come take off. What do you see?”

There is a sting in your pricked eyes. The pain prepares them to break away from the body they’ve long been fixed to. Before they fall, you grope to locate them. The moment your eyes—so naturally, unquestioningly attached—begin to tremble, their position and sensation become suddenly unfamiliar. Here, gazes pour in. Eyes look out from beyond the painting’s surface and meet your eyes. In that encounter, another beginning for the eye is signaled. On the edge of “take off”—where are your eyes now? Are they ready to take off—ready to leave your body behind?