Billy Kang cannot recall his first memory. When I ask over the phone, he tells me, “I do, however, remember my first sublime moment.” It was 2003, and Billy was 17 at the Art Institute of Chicago for a summer painting program. He stared at a Clyfford Still painting, unsure at what he was looking, the entire canvas hijacked by sculptural black oil paint; a frail fissure vertically cleaves the piece. “Then I discovered the orange sliver at the lower right corner of the canvas. I understood the power of terrorism, how fear of the unknown can be a powerful tool to one’s imagination.”

His response intrigued me, so I later googled “Clyfford Still + Art Institute.” There were two options: Untitled, 1958 and 1951-52. Neither had an orange sliver in the lower right corner. 

“Billy,” I texted, “Did you mean the upper right?” I circled the orange blotch in Untitled, 1958. I was hesitant; Billy, I was certain, was more nuanced than this. 

He replied with the facepalm emoji and pointed to a slight orange shadow, too small for me to notice quickly on a computer, in 1951-52, along the lower-left corner. 

Right or left, it didn’t matter to me, so I said, “Sometimes, I think, the memory is more important than the truth,” which is why I’ve always loved his art: it hangs amid memory, in both form and concept, depicting more than just facts. His work is an unfolding story, a joint effort between viewer and artist, based in the past but revealing the future.

Whenever I tell a story, I promise the listener that what I am saying is probably untrue. Truth, in this case, is not important; the story is an allegory for something bigger: the meaning. When I am not telling a story, I’m lost in memory, recreating moments past, pretending what I’m seeing is true, but knowing I embellish, to teach myself a lesson or ease the hurt of something like heartache. Events easily change twice, even thrice, an hour. Maybe first I’ll try to accurately remember the event, then I’ll relive it—speak differently, say what I always wanted to say, edit the dialogue completely. My favorite? What I call “future memories.” When I promise myself I’ll act a certain way when a certain situation unfolds. Normally, it is my speaking to someone. It is a month from now, and I am walking my dog with my dad; we are finding leaves that look like the silhouettes of family members, and I say, “Hey, dad, remember when you never forgot to pick me up from elementary school? Do you remember how I never was the last little kid waiting, booted and snow jacketed up, with a teacher then she never called mom to tell her you forgot me again?” 

This bemusement at memory is something that quickly unites Billy and me in our recent conversations. A little over 15 years ago, we were high-school classmates, passing friends who lost touch after graduation. We reconnected a year ago after Instagram’s algorithm recommended his profile to me. I fell in love with his painting Smoke Clouds. On the surface, fluffy chick-yellow clouds float in a dreamy Creamsicle-blue sky that swallows the mid- and background. An unexpectedly textured, dark brown landscape lines the bottom. This stretch suggests a tunnel or mound of earth. 

Smoke Clouds reminded me of my favorite Van Gogh painting, Le viaduc, or “Roadway with Underpass,” a modest painting of a nondescript, unlit tunnel. As a volunteer at the Guggenheim in 2008 or ’9, I supported an NYU professor conducting permanent-collection tours for the Young Collectors Council, during which he only talked about three artworks: Picasso’s La repasseuse, or “Woman Ironing,” Cezanne’s Bibémus, and Le viaduc, which he saved for last. On every tour, he discussed that Van Gogh for a full hour. During the final run, two drunk women began laughing about, from what I could hear, their vacation in St. Barts. The professor was furious and scolded them in front of the group. First, he forced them to tell the group what they were talking about, then he asked if their chat was more important than the depth of Van Gogh’s depression—this painting, the last work Van Gogh painted, the professor claimed (but I still cannot validate), before he left Paris to die; this tunnel, a manifestation of the artist’s mental condition. A darkened passage with no light to guide him. “My God,” he said. “Please carry on if it is.” They didn’t; red-faced and puffed cheeks, they clenched their jaws for the rest of the talk.

Today, Billy and I are two professionals coming together to talk about his art over phone, text, and email. I am in Los Angeles, and Billy is stuck in our hometown while the world shelters in place. His stay was supposed to be a steppingstone between Seoul, where he’s lived for the past few years, and Cardiff, where he will move once the UK releases his visa. I ask him how it is, and he says it’s “enjoyable but strange. My current studio is my brother’s old room.” 

In his brother’s old room, he paints from memory, as he always does. Rather than using photography to capture the landscapes he renders, Billy has long relied on his studies, mainly quick drawings en plein air and most importantly a few sentences that he can meditate on later in his sketchbook. At home, a sentence inspires a memory: who he was with, the time, the colors, the shapes, the smells, the details. From there, the painting takes on a form of its own, or as Billy explains: “I work on a surface and layer towards a finish. However, it can take one drawing or color, or even an encounter in the city that can drastically change the outcome. The painting dictates its future, I’ll often start with an idea or image, but its arrival is determined on the surface.” The painting, it seems, may become one of these future memories I talk about: a restructuring of what happened and the creation of what may happen. Does the painting imagine as I do? My head spins and I text Billy that his layers, his nostalgic blurs created from conté crayon on oil, have pushed me into an existential crisis, and he responds, “I’ve been there, still there.”

I’ve been reading Soviet literature while self-isolating. When I imagine Billy in his childhood brick house at the end of a cul-de-sac, I cannot help but think of Brodsky’s homage to his parents’ home, “In a Room and a Half." I read a section of it to Billy:

What memory has in common with art is the knack for selection, the taste for detail. Complimentary though this observation may seem to art (that of prose in particular), to memory it should appear insulting. The insult, however, is well deserved. Memory contains precisely details, not the whole picture; highlights, if you will, not the entire show. The conviction that we are somehow remembering the whole thing in a blanket fashion, the very conviction that allows the species to go on with its life, is groundless. More than anything, memory resembles a library in alphabetical disorder, and with no collected works by anyone. 

This moves Billy, but he also wonders, as he does in his paintings, how it is that the most unassuming detail, when rendered through paint, crayon, and graphite on canvas or wood or on paper, a sketchbook, even, can unfurl a rush of vivid memories in all of us?

In his artwork, he investigates this with simple metonymic shapes that belie great conceptual and emotional depth; his composition buzzes with a pointillistic tension generated through his idiosyncratic application of color theory and an intense engagement with symbolism. On his canvas, effortless imagery is language. In this detail of Witness HMS, flattened symbols fill in for enumerable objects of our lives, each with its own story. The pink, lined semicircle, inverted and balanced on another line, what does it evoke for you? A childhood trip to the coast, a café table in Lucca where you tried gelato stracciatella for the first time, sticky hands holding your snow cone while you wait in line at Coney Island? The wish to spin a globe and buy a one-way ticket to the spot on which your finger lands? Billy says that years of repetition and practice have helped him understand shapes like these—they can hold his intention while leaving room for their own. It’s a true skill to make so much out of a semicircle, to make more than you can imagine while painting it.

The ability of these paintings to provoke and frustrate memory also comes from where their creator lives; teetering in a liminal space is where Billy says he is most comfortable. He grew up a first-generation American with Korean parents who were quadrilingual: English, Korean, American sign language, and Korean sign language. He is fluent in the first three but remembers answering his parents in English whenever possible, but not as an act of defiance. From a young age, he says he was made intimately aware of how communication extends beyond words, into space and gestures of care: “We were always patient with each other, and I never felt angry having to explain cultural differences or by language barriers. We were in it together.” 

Still, the act of answering in English could have been an attempt to distinguish himself from his family, he thinks. Stretched thin by his many identities, he says that he always struggled to find a singular one. “In America, when I would say I was born in Detroit, often, the following question was where my parents were from. I would respond, 'Oh, I'm Korean.’ And that would be satisfactory.” When he moved to Korea for the first time, he expected to finally fit in, but often found himself defined by what he was not, by how he differed from those around him: “From the moment I arrived I must have smelled different; I was immediately viewed as a foreigner. By the way I walked, by the way I carried myself. I'm sure by the end, I had assimilated, or was more sensitive, but it became exhausting." I wasn’t sure how to respond. The concept wasn’t new to me. I’ve talked to thousands of people about this before, I've written about it, but this was Billy; I didn’t know he felt this way when I waved to him from my car in the Troy High parking lot. “The intent was never to oppress,” he says, “I believe it's just the cultural make-up of the society."

However, Billy may find unity in one place: nature, somewhere his practice always returns. As a child, he would reproduce drawings of photography in National Geographic or sights from camping trips with his father. From those trips he remembers the pain in his legs after biking 20 miles from South Haven to Kalamazoo, the humid Michigan summer clinging to every inch of exposed skin, swamping his clothes, and the unsettling feeling of seeing the sun set before he was back at camp. He remembers following the phone lines with his eyes on drives to the campground, his forehead pressed against the glass of the passenger-side window, how in the middle of nowhere communication is layered in participation, presence, and silence. I can see this learned skill of filling in the blanks. These memories transform his current work into ubiquitous landscapes, in which specificity is built out in the viewer’s mind. You can almost hear his painting’s surface say, “I am so much more than I appear.”

I’m on Instagram again, drinking too much coffee because I cannot leave my house while I’m scrolling through Billy’s newest work. I glean the artist’s touch through zooms and a long education of first seeing famous artworks reproduced in slides or images. Art critics often ask the viewer to look beyond the canvas. They’ll tell you that artists intend the composition to exist outside the boundaries of the physical canvas; for example, I’ve been taught that Matisse’s The Dessert: Harmony in Red implores the viewer to chase its floral wallpaper as it usurps the table and the wall and the viewer’s experience, that the cutoff window and chair beg my imagination to envision a room beyond the painting’s edges, that a canvas cannot sufficiently hold my mind. To me, Billy’s work, like Van Gogh’s Le viaduc, invites me to crawl inside, where it is warm and familiar—to contemplate what the artist has made, has lived through, and wants to share. 

When I look at Billy’s work now, I think back to my first high-school National Art Honor Society meeting. At the time, I was anti-everything and refused to join the more financially supported National Honor Society, however little I fit into the Art one. I was a math-focused student with an undiagnosed form of dyslexia and poor coordination, and even though I had never created more than a geometry proof I was drawn to artists. In this meeting, easels surrounded a still-life construction of broken clay pieces and faux flowers organized on dusty blue velvet drapery. (Was it really blue? I note to ask Billy.) There I stood, staring at my blank canvas, approaching it like an equation, “Well, if I am to put that here, what would logically go there?” The daunting constrictions of size, perspective, shape dizzied me. I looked around and saw Billy with a large brush thickened with dense blue paint. He slashed the canvas, not quite down the center, and that single stroke was so striking to me. I didn’t want to try anymore, not because I felt inadequate, but because I wanted to capture this serene moment when a line on canvas calmed my anxiety and share it with the world. How, I thought, could one line make my heart swell out of my chest and fill my stomach with awe? The simplicity made me feel safe and understood. That was my first sublime moment, and when I tell Billy, he swears that he cannot remember that meeting for the life of him, but he likes the point. 

Megan Garwood is on Instagram @terriblemegan