In recent painting, contemporary relevance is achieved less through the invention of new forms or subjects than through a renewed attentiveness to how painting is perceived, interpreted, and framed. Increasingly, artists engage in a meta-critical reflection on the content and structure of traditional painting, revealing new perspectives embedded within its inherited conventions.

Within the Korean art scene, many painters still rely on pre-19th-century pictorial strategies or uncritically emulate the work of prominent Western contemporaries. In contrast, Im Sunny’s exhibition 《The Flat》 offers a clear view of how a contemporary painter actively responds to such conditions.

Im Sunny seeks to re-examine, within the trajectory of contemporary painting, the problem of flatness—a question that emerged after Cézanne, when painting began with the effort to eliminate the objective representation of the external appearance of objects.
 
For her, flatness is not the illusion of space produced through linear perspective, but rather the density and layering that become visible through the intervals and relationships between areas of color.

In other words, through 'color' and 'brushstroke', she aims not to depict the form of an object but to further foreground the pictorial elements that constitute it, thereby preserving the object’s presence while simultaneously inscribing the subject’s act of seeing onto the surface of the canvas.

Furthermore, the artist attains the true reality of the two-dimensional picture plane by constructing form not through contours or cast shadows, but through subtle, gradual modulations of color.
 
For instance, in Still Life with a Book, the representational forms—such as the desk and the cup—function merely as intermediaries for revealing the essence of the planar surface; rather than engaging in representation or depiction, she appropriates and repositions the techniques of earlier painters, thereby prompting viewers to perceive these motifs from a renewed perspective.
 
This exhibition is significant in that it revisits, within the context of Korean contemporary art, the questions of flatness and purity that have been central to modern and contemporary painting since the nineteenth century, and it offers an intriguing opportunity to observe how a meta-critical perspective on painting unfolds in the present.