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Ghosting"”What Lies Hidden Under the After-image Diogenes"”still remembered as the man who said to Alexander the Great, "I would like you not to block the sun""”has taught us to defy all convention; to not lose our self dignity; and to find our happiness in our inner, not outer, world. He yearned for a pure, anarchist state of being and tried to make people realize that conventions and traditions, such as laws and systems, are mere bubbles. His world view can be defined, in a nutshell, by the Greek word "kynic." The term refers to a "pleasure-seeking anarchist skeptic," but one who should not be a cynic. Such attitude, surprisingly, overlaps with the artistic phenomena taking place in our time: the convention-defying avant-garde spirit; art that is armored with attitude rather than form; protest against conventional beliefs and systems; the gesture of spitting at the world; meaningless pleasures; and nevertheless, an attitude of pluralism, that last bastion which at least keeps us from turning cynical, maintaining tolerance for the traits and sensibilities of others. Such phenomena define post-modernism. In this sense, the Diogenesian spirit is a distant ancestor of post-modernism. Kim Dong-jin's paintings are also trees that have been nursed by the waters of a Diogenesian spring. His artistic journey, which began in 1991, was one headed towards the fringe, embracing things that no one bothered to look at. Kim turned away from what was mainstream or powerful or muscular, famous, expensive or trendy, as well as all that others longed to possess and to acquire"”what people found beautiful, irresistible, sweet, hedonistic, splendid or orderly"”and instead, pulled to his side and made strictly his own all that was on the other end. He dug up nostalgia from old forgotten posters of rural villages and brought to the center stage used machine parts that had been brutally abandoned. He loved stale, soggy cookies rather than sweet, crispy biscuits. He preferred the grotesque ugliness of an old man's dentures to the balance created by a pair of beautiful breasts. By denying the conceptual system of what others believe to be right or good, Kim developed an aethestics of negation and discovered an even stronger life force from death imagery, rather than from life imagery.