■ About Cougar

Cougar is a painter whose central concern is the design of the threshold of perception.

Rather than presenting the image itself, the work constructs the very conditions under which an image comes into being.

For this reason, Cougar’s paintings do not offer a completed image.

By manipulating multiple elements such as resolution, light, space, and distance,

the image does not remain fixed as information on the picture plane,

but instead comes into being within the viewer’s perception.

■ Core Concept

Perception is not a faculty that simply receives a completed image as it is.

We tend to believe that we understand what we see immediately,

yet in reality an image always emerges only after being supplemented and interpreted from a state of uncertainty.

Just before that moment of determination, there is a state in which the image cannot yet be fully identified,

and meaning still remains in fluctuation.

Cougar calls this state “the threshold of perception.”

Within this threshold, vision continues to move between the determined and the undetermined.

The image does not merely exist as a fixed object,

but continues to come into being through repeated completion and reconstruction within perception.

By intentionally generating this unstable yet fertile state of emergence,

the work leads the viewer to become newly aware of their own perception

and toward an experience in which seeing touches one’s own life.

■ Resolutionism

Resolutionism is a methodology for designing the threshold of perception.

Resolution is usually understood as a means of making an image clearer, increasing information, and enhancing visibility.

In Cougar’s work, however, resolution is not simply a technical measure for sharpening an image.

Rather, it is a structural means of limiting information in order to create a condition in which vision cannot immediately determine the image.

Instead of clarifying the image, it deliberately holds it in a state that cannot be fully fixed.

As a result, the image is not fixed on the picture plane,

but continues to come into being within the viewer’s perception.

This method unfolds through multiple forms, including pixels (dots), spatial structure, light and shadow, the distance between materials, and surface fluctuation.

These do not function as devices for fixing the image,

but as conditions that allow the image to continue coming into being within perception.

■ Manifesto

 On the Threshold of Perception

Painting is not something that depicts an image.

It designs the conditions under which an image comes into being.

We receive what we see as though it were something certain.

Yet perception always begins from uncertainty

and comes into being through completion and interpretation.

To see does not simply mean that an object is there before us.

It means that an image has only just come into being

through the intersection of object and vision, memory and judgment, distance and time.

Just before that emergence,

there is a state in which the image still cannot be fully fixed.

I call that state “the threshold of perception.”

There, the image is not given as a completed answer,

but rises into being while fluctuating within the viewer’s perception.

By restricting resolution, manipulating light and shadow, and establishing distance in space,

the image ceases to remain fixed

and instead repeats completion and reconstruction within perception.

By designing those conditions,

the work lays bare the very workings of vision itself.

The work is not the image.

It is the working of perception itself.

To see is not an act of recognizing the external world.

It is an act of touching one’s own perception.

And that touching does not remain at the level of cognition alone.

It is also an act of confirming how one’s own life comes into contact with the world.

Seeing is not the reception of an image,

but the act of placing oneself within the uncertain relation that arises between self and world.

Painting is a structure that allows that relation to come into being, quietly yet unmistakably.