The Brooklyn Rail

Lumin was passionate about observing the world, and she had dozens of daily rituals that involved meditating upon the visual splendor of everything around her: trees, flowers, the sky, our cats, our daughters, or me. Reflecting on the twenty years I knew her, it’s remarkable that it took a pandemic lockdown to persuade her to revisit observational painting for the first time since her undergraduate days. Social isolation, shuttered schools, and closed playgrounds compelled Lumin to bring her easel to the local cemeteries, where she could let Frida and Liv run around gravestones as she painted.

Lumin started each day by gazing out of our bedroom onto the laurel oak tree that towers over our small row house. She hated curtains; I insisted on them at night, but then it was my job to make sure they were open again before she awoke. She would then sip her morning coffee on the back porch, admiring our neighbor’s dogwood blossoms, or, if it was cold, looking out onto her garden from our couch. If it were a sunny day, she would start by setting up a canvas in our front yard and paint from our garden, or our neighbors’ cherry tree, quince tree, grape vines, and lilacs. Lumin was ambidextrous—she used her less dominant right hand to establish compositions and shapes, before switching to her left for details and control. On hot summer days, she would fill our kiddie pool underneath her easel to keep her feet cool. If it was raining, she was never in a rush to get to the studio. Instead, she would wrap herself in a blanket and sit on a bench underneath the front awning, taking in the visual wonder of watching the boundaries between all things dissolve through the refracting curtain of water droplets.

I was never allowed to look upon the looking. Being observed would turn her into a person observing. Left alone, she could lose her sense of self and become a mirror to the world. The times I would stumble upon her working, it was just as likely that I would see her with a brush in hand as I would see her sitting on the bench with her knees pulled up to her chest, gazing out into the world. When I looked, I saw the same garden; she saw a never-ending river of change.

In her countless hours of stillness, she would discover entire worlds hidden from my view. The summer before she was diagnosed, she made friends with a praying mantis who resided in our rhododendron bush. Just like Lumin, the mantis would sit in total stillness, its compound eyes taking in every single thing to find a passing meal. Try as I might, I could never find this expert in camouflage, but Lumin always knew where she was. In the fall, Lumin watched her create her ootheca (egg nursery). Like Wilbur, watching over Charlotte’s egg sack, Lumin stood vigil over this magical object throughout that bitter winter, wishing desperately to bear witness to the hundreds of micro mantises crawling into existence—her new companions in looking.

As springtime approached, Lumin was so busy preparing for her final two solo shows and coping with a confusing constellation of health issues that she missed the hatching. She was always a strangely prescient person, and in hindsight, it is hard not to see her recent work as a premonition of her own ending. Six weeks before we discovered her tumor, she started telling me daily that she feared she was going to die. It was unfamiliar to see her worried in such a way. Then, two weeks before we were scheduled to fly to Seoul for her opening with Various Small Fires, she got more specific: if she got on that plane, she wouldn’t return home alive. Five days before we departed, we finally discovered in the Wykoff Hospital E.R. what she already knew.

She dealt with her terminal diagnosis by welcoming her loved ones closer, and daily walks with her friends became her most cherished daily practice. As she walked out through the front garden, she continued to search for her baby mantises, to no avail. The disease eventually progressed to the point of home hospice. As Lumin’s world and memory contracted, I often wondered what universes were unfolding right outside my door. Was there any hope that I, like Lumin, could learn to sit still enough, for long enough, to witness them?