This research explores how artists in painting practice can escape from established, rigid models and embark on a continuous internal revolution along a line of flight toward the minor. Drawing upon Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of the minor, this research proposes that a minor practice is not an aesthetic style or a category defined by mainstream discourse, but rather a continuous movement of self-alienation initiated from within the major system. To find this line of flight, the research is grounded in thinking from within the practice, adopting the researcher’s own position of in-betweenness as its core perspective, a position shaped by multiple systems, including traditional Eastern, Western realist, and contemporary art. This unique perspective critiques any singular, linear conception of art history, which in turn leads to the working method of drawing the future from the past, aiming to strategically revisit and reactivate the latent potentials within histories that mainstream narratives have deemed obsolete. To translate these into concrete action strategies, this research draws on Roger Caillois’s theory of biological mimicry and Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of becoming to construct an operational model named Mimicry-Becoming. This model employs mimicry as a strategy to suspend the centralized artistic subject, thereby opening up two intertwined paths of becoming: the first replaces clarity of meaning with the purity and continuity of intensity itself as the internal measure of practice; the second moves outward to capture the rhythms and forces of heterogeneous others, translating them through the irreducible force of bodily intensity and producing an unfamiliar, unstable hybrid through collision and mixture. Ultimately, these paths converge toward an intensive practice that embraces process and becomes-with-the-world. This research positions minor painting practice as a necessary vital gesture and a perceptual revolution. It not only challenges singular art-historical narratives through its unique strategies but, more importantly, enables painting to function as a potent ethical and political response in an Anthropocene era defined by systemic uncertainty and ecological crisis, thus opening up new dimensions of meaning for the practice of contemporary painting.

Some elements of this thesis have been redacted for reasons of copyright