“Flowers of Night and Flowers of Day”

“Flowers of Night and Flowers of Day” is the title Mr. Cheong gives a silent film of himself painting flowers on Yeong-hye’s body. The phrase joins two complementary designs—flowers on her back and flowers on her front—and carries them into a work whose closing attention to the Mongolian mark makes the painted image more than decoration.

The paired designs

The night flowers begin on Yeong-hye’s back. Mr. Cheong paints red and orange buds across her shoulders, then carries slender stems down her side and over her right thigh to her ankle. At the right buttock, a large orange bloom has a vivid yellow center. The design does not cover the Mongolian mark on the left buttock: he leaves it bare and paints a faint green wash around it, so that the bluish mark remains visible as the shadow of a flower.

The day flowers extend the floral pattern to the front of Yeong-hye’s body. Mr. Cheong paints broad clusters of yellow and white from her collarbone to her breasts, orange day lilies on her stomach, and golden petals across her thighs. His distinction between night and day gives the two sides of the painted body separate visual registers, while the flowers and stems make the designs continuous across it.

From painting to film

The phrase first describes the images made during the painting session, but it also becomes the title of the finished film. Mr. Cheong works from a camcorder fixed on a tripod, with Yeong-hye’s body filling the frame. The completed film runs for four minutes and fifty-five seconds. It opens with a shot of his hand painting her prone body, fades out on the Mongolian mark, and then shows her face, shadowed almost beyond recognition, before fading out again.

Mr. Cheong decides against adding music. He wants the images to appear to unfold in a kind of vacuum, with the silent movement of Yeong-hye’s painted body carrying the sequence. The title thus names not only the flowers but also the film’s visual construction: the painted body, its movement, and the mark that the editing singles out.

The mark and the work’s open meaning

The Mongolian mark is both part of the floral composition and an interruption within it. On Yeong-hye’s back, the green wash surrounds rather than conceals it; in the finished film, the mark receives its own fade-out. The title’s paired flowers therefore do not smooth over every difference in the image. The mark remains visible, singled out by both the painting and the edit.

After finishing this film, Mr. Cheong imagines a second work, also centered on painted bodies, but he has not made it. The distinction matters: “Flowers of Night and Flowers of Day” is the completed piece, while the imagined sequel remains a possibility. The title belongs to an artwork that turns a painting session into silent, carefully edited images, leaving the significance of the mark and of the film’s stillness unresolved.