Choi Tae-man Critique in 'Field of Creation' Magazine (1990)

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• Text Review 2018-08-29 · Choi Tae-man

  〈"Painting the 12 Spectacles of Mount Geumgang Here and Now"〉 — Critique by Choi Tae-man (2018)

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  Text Review 2018-08-29 · Choi Tae-man

  〈"Painting the 12 Spectacles of Mount Geumgang Here and Now"〉 — Critique by Choi Tae-man (2018)

  Painting the 12 Spectacles of Mount Geumgang "Here and Now"

  On November 18, 1998, a tour ship set sail for Mount Geumgang. Though access was limited to the outer Geumgang area, it was the first time in more than 50 years for South Koreans to set foot in the Geumgang Mountains. This event marked the reopening of exchanges between the North and the South on the divided Korean peninsula, and in June 2007 parts of the inner Geumgang region also were opened to tourists. In July 2008, however, the program was discontinued, and Mt. Geumgang went back to being an object of aspiration, as in the classical song Longing for Mount Geumgang, a Korean favorite.

  Mt. Geumgang is known for its distinct appearance in each season. Poetic names have been given it, such as bongrae in the summer when shades of green cover the landscape, pungak in the fall when the tinted foliage spreads throughout the peaks and the valleys, and gaegol in the winter when the leaves are gone and the rocks are revealed. During the Goryeo Dynasty, paintings of Mt. Geumgang formed a significant part of tributes to China, and in the Joseon Dynasty many artists explored the mountains in attempts to express their beautiful form. There is a story from the late Joseon period about an artist named Choi Buk, a successor of the jingyeong (true-view landscape) painting style, who tried to jump into Guryongyeon pond while traveling through the Geumgang Mountains. He is said to have exclaimed, "It would be fitting for a celebrity like myself to die at such a celebrated mountain." The story reveals the extent to which these mountains have been a cherished destination since long ago.

  Artist Shin Jang-sik had been painting the Geumgang Mountains for some time before they were opened to visitors. Upon the start of the tours, he boarded the Hyundai Geumgang, the first vessel to sail from Port Donghae to Port Jangjeon. Since then he has visited Mt. Geumgang often and with increasing exhilaration, and has brought back beautiful scenes of the mountains in his picture-planes. Mt. Geumgang has motivated his work, and moved him to search for the reasons behind it. His works, while true to the real landscapes, do not simply represent the scenery. Through them Shin reveals the skin and the inner flesh of Mt. Geumgang, by his own unique method. And this would be impossible without the sense of awe he feels toward the mountains.

  Having continuously painted the Geumgang mountains as he sees and feels them first hand, and having shown them in numerous solo exhibitions, Shin Jang-sik is now holding an exhibition on the theme "12 Spectacles of Mt. Geumgang." To provide some traditional background: Chinese Confucian scholar Zhu Xi, who founded Neo-Confucianism in his hometown in Mt. Wuyi, Fujian Province, left a poem titled Wuyi-jiuquge (song of the nine river bends in Wuyi), which expressed the beauty of nine valleys in the Wuyi Mountains. Later, many artists made paintings based on this poem. Another example is Xiaoxiang Bajing-tu (picture of eight scenes of the Xiao and Xiang rivers), which are paintings of the beautiful scenery surrounding the Xiao River and Xiang River, flowing into Dongting Lake, located midstream in the Yangtze River. While these theme-based paintings used famous scenic places as subject and subject matter, portraying each spectacle in a series consisting of eight or nine pieces, another Eastern tradition with a long history was seasonal paintings (sagyedo), which showed the scenes of spring, summer, autumn and winter in a certain landscape. Though Mt. Geumgang is a vast, deep mountain range with many mysterious scenes, Shin approached it by painting the 12 months of the mountain landscape. This shows his intention to include time in the works, in addition to space.

  The charm of his 12 Spectacles of Mt. Geumgang increases as we savor them one by one, as if we were reciting 12 poems. The works can be appreciated in many ways, such as grouping them according to certain times of year, or considering them as a single organism as we travel through time. For example, in Light of Okryudong, in which the pine tree in the foreground is done in silhouette while the mid-range scene of the rocky mountains is fully depicted and the distant view is expressed in a blue tone; Spring of Onjeongri, in which flowers in full bloom are painted against a background of the hazy Sujeong Peak; and Light of Sujeong Peak, in which the shades of green deepen—in all of these scenes, viewers can feel the vibrant life of spring in the mountains through the use of light. Next we come to Light of Manpokdong, which reveals nature maturing with fresh trees and plants at their height; the July Manmulsang, concealing itself in the rain; and Summer of Haegeumgang, where the coastal rocks stand tall as they face the waves in the scorching sun; and we feel as if we are truly immersed in the full beauty of the Bongrae Mountain. We then step into the Pungak Mountain, in the climax of its beauty in the Baekdudaegan mountain range of September, worthy of the title "Geumsugangsan (beautiful rivers and mountains like silk embroidery)"; Samseonam in its brilliant new costume; and Jipseon Peak with its bizarre rock formations exposed in preparation for winter. Finally, we are humbled by the perpetuity of nature at Biro Peak, welcoming a time of silence. After viewing the Light of Cheonhwadae, named for its resemblance to flowers blooming in the sky, a painting of the snow-covered peaks and mountains in a blue tone, spectators then arrive once again at Manmulsang, now surrounded by trees and plants just about to sprout their buds of life.

  Flowing through this travel in time is the light of Mt. Geumgang. In Shin's work this light emerges in a bluish hue. It is the auspicious energy that intertwines his works, and the driving force that gives them life. Mt. Geumgang must be reopened, even if it is for the sole reason of being submerged in that light once more. Shin Jang-sik's 12 Spectacles of Mt. Geumgang exist before us in the present tense, because they enlighten us of the fact that the Geumgang Mountains are "here, now."

  Choi Tae-man, Art Critic

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• Text Review 2012-11-15 · Choi Tae-man

  〈Pilgrim on the Road, or One Who Searches for the Path〉 — Choi Tae-man review (2012)

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  Text Review 2012-11-15 · Choi Tae-man

  〈Pilgrim on the Road, or One Who Searches for the Path〉 — Choi Tae-man review (2012)

  Seeking Samādhi (三昧)

  Having visited Inner Geumgang in 2007, Shin Jang-sik presented, alongside landscape paintings rendering the beautiful terrain of Inner Geumgang — Manpokdong, Bodeokam, Pyohunsa, and the site of Jang'ansa — the work 〈Myogilsang of Inner Geumgang〉. This Myogilsang (妙吉祥), designated by the North as National Treasure no. 102 in cultural relics, is said to have been carved by the monk Naong (懶翁), who restored Myogilsang Hermitage in the late Goryeo period. With the Buddha image alone reaching 15 meters on a cliff face 40 meters high, it is a vast work — a representative example of cliff-carved Buddha images of the Goryeo period. Because Myogilsang Hermitage once stood at the site of this cliff Buddha, the work is called Myogilsang, a name referring to Mañjuśrī Bodhisattva. Yet judging from the figure's facial features and the mudrā suggesting the welcoming gesture (來迎印), this is, evidently, an Amitābha Tathāgata.

  Even from the time of his Arirang-themed works, Shin Jang-sik had been making works that revealed Buddhist features such as the lotus and the maṇḍala (a sacred geometric diagram in Buddhist tradition); in his 2001 solo exhibition he had shown his interest in Buddhism through paper-cast sculptures of his own meditating figure. The Myogilsang must be, I think, the first time he painted a Buddha image. Yet, by drawing alongside the Buddha visitors who had come to Inner Geumgang, this work might better be read as a painting of the actual landscape that contains the Buddha rather than as the Buddha image itself taken as theme. This time, however, he has set his heart on painting Buddha images. From the right-hand attendant Bodhisattva — the smiling, childlike attendant of the Maitreya triad excavated at Samhwa-ryeong in Gyeongju — to National Treasure no. 83 (the pensive bodhisattva), the cliff-carved Bodhisattva in pensive posture at Sinseonam on Mt. Namsan in Gyeongju, the stone seated Tathāgata at Mireukgok on Mt. Namsan, as well as bodhisattva images from the Maijishan Grottoes of China and Buddha images excavated from Gandhāra sites in Pakistan — the Buddha images he has painted span varied regions and periods. Yet within his works, the principal image of the Seokguram, representative of Korean Buddhist sculpture, is not to be seen. The reason is that, concentrating on the theme of samādhi for this exhibition, he attended to Buddha images that best show the state of samādhi.

  Sammae (三昧) is a transliteration of the ancient Indian Sanskrit "samādhi," but according to its meaning it is also translated as jeong (定), simil-gyeongseong (心一境性, the one-pointedness of mind), or ilsim bulran (一心不亂, the unstirred unity of mind). It is, above all, a concept that condenses the practice of Śākyamuni; "ilche-jebeop chesyeong pyeongdeung muhuiron sammae (一切諸法體性平等無戱論三昧)" — the samādhi of the equal nature of all dharmas without idle elaboration — which Śākyamuni Buddha spoke in answer to Moonlight Boy's question in the Candrapradīpa Samādhi Sūtra (月燈三昧經), can be said to show well the realm of samādhi. Śākyamuni reached awakening through the practice of samādhi, and taught that in samādhi one can penetrate the truth that all existence is without substance and is mere phantasm.

  Even before leaving home, Gautama Bodhisattva is said to have practiced meditation. After leaving home, through Brahmin teachers such as Āḷāra Kālāma and Uddaka Rāmaputta, he reached the spheres of nothingness and neither-perception-nor-non-perception, but realized that genuine awakening could not be attained by such means; after extreme ascetic practice, he entered deep meditation beneath the Bodhi tree and at last attained the way. Thus samādhi was the path that, transcending the self, reached the realm in which all dharmas are without self (諸法無我). So Shin Jang-sik, by painting again the Buddha images of bodhisattvas and Buddhas absorbed in the deepest meditation, seeks to draw close to that realm of samādhi.

  The Wayfarer on the Path

  Once Shin Jang-sik said of himself, "My fifties in life are those of a wayfaring practitioner." For my part, I do not think he defined himself as a religious practitioner in the strict sense. This can be confirmed in his own words: "I have come to think that the way of the artist is also the way of the practitioner, and that painting too is an instrument of practice. What was I looking for, wandering East and West, past and present? If I can express even a little of that light, that would be enough. I want to sing 'the Arirang of hope' in painting." The practitioner he speaks of is, in another phrasing, "one who searches for the path."

  He has walked countless roads. Among them, the Tibet travel from Lhasa to Kathmandu, two travels to India, and in 2011 the Silk Road pilgrimage from Xi'an through the Hexi Corridor, across the Pamir highlands, and on to Gandhāra — these became occasions that more deeply etched the figure of the practitioner that already dwelt in his heart. Through these travels he met Śākyamuni, the true wayfarer on the path. Was Śākyamuni not the one who was born on the road, attained the way in the forest where the road lay, walked countless roads bringing sentient beings across in compassion, and entered nirvāṇa (liberation from the cycle of suffering in Buddhist teaching) on the road? Among the many Buddhist scriptures, the one that best shows the "wayfarer on the path" must be the chapter "Entering the Dharma Realm" (立法界品) of the Avataṃsaka Sūtra. Sudhana (善財) — the practitioner and seeker of that chapter — did not set out merely to find bodhisattvas alone, those who, seeking awakening above and saving sentient beings below, embody the vow. Among the fifty-three good friends he met were not only bodhisattvas, monks, nuns, and laywomen but also Brahmins — formerly excluded by Buddhism as outsiders — wandering ascetics, sages, gods, and worldly people such as kings, elders, doctors, ferrymen, and householders' wives; even boys and girls, and a woman known as a courtesan. Thus Buddhism teaches that one can meet countless people on the road of seeking, and that through them one can reach the way. The openness and innovativeness of Buddhism — which does not separate subject and object and seeks freedom from attachment to self (我執) and to dharma (法執) — must be the dependent arising (緣起) that led Shin Jang-sik to walk the road.

  The road Shin Jang-sik walked was the road Hyecho (慧超), who had gone from Silla to the Tang for study, walked in seeking the Dharma. Before him, Faxian (法顯) and Xuanzang (玄奘) took that road. There were also others — the Goguryeo monks Seungrang (僧朗) and Damjing (曇徵), who studied in China during the Northern and Southern Dynasties; Gyeomik (謙益) and Hyechong (慧怱) of Baekje; Ariyabalma (阿離耶跋摩) of Silla — who set out from the Korean peninsula for China. Ariyabalma, having set out from Chang'an the Tang capital, made pilgrimage to Buddhist holy sites in India and studied the Vinaya and Abhidharma at Nālandā, but did not return to Silla; he is said to have passed away at Nālandā. Today, with travel programs and developed means of transport, one need not stake one's life on the road as the seeker-monks of old; yet Shin Jang-sik, walking the very roads they had crossed, was able to meet not only Śākyamuni but also predecessors such as Kumārajīva (鳩摩羅什) and Marananta (摩羅難陀). Such experience is what led him to paint Buddha images.

  Buddha-nature Spreading Through the Universe

  Then why does he, of all things, paint Buddha images? And why is he so attached to Buddha images — already well-known cultural heritage and objects of worship? From the time the Buddha image first appeared, the norms of the "32 marks and 80 minor characteristics" were applied to emphasize the transcendence of the Buddha; these norms must be observed whenever one makes a Buddha image as an object of worship. Moreover, since the sacred features of the Buddha are not to be carved carelessly by anyone, they must be made with utmost devotion and the pure heart of a practitioner. But the Buddha images Shin Jang-sik paints are clearly not objects of worship. His painting of Buddha images is only the outward manifestation of the reverent awe (畏敬心) toward the Buddha that he, as an artist, has carried in his heart. Even so, questions remain.

  The Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra (大般涅槃經) records the answer Śākyamuni Buddha gave Ānanda, who asked at the time of his nirvāṇa how the Tathāgata's body should be tended:

  "Ānanda, do not concern yourself with the tending of the Tathāgata's body. Ānanda, devote yourselves to the root, be absorbed in the root. Do not be careless in the root; abide diligent and self-driven. Ānanda, there will be wise Kṣatriya and wise Gṛhapati who hold a pure heart for the Tathāgata, and they will tend the Tathāgata's body."

  As his end drew near, Śākyamuni, with the final teaching "Monks, all formed things are subject to decay; do not be careless, strive on diligently," entered parinirvāṇa. When at last Śākyamuni Buddha entered nirvāṇa beneath the two sala trees at Kuśinagara, his disciples adorned the body with flowers and tended it for a week. Disciples who awaited Mahākāśyapa — who, hearing of the Buddha's nirvāṇa, was hastening to the funeral — after a week moved the body to the Makutabandhana temple. When Mahākāśyapa arrived, under his direction the disciples cremated the Buddha's body according to the traditional Indian funeral rites and gathered the relics. Despite the final teaching not to grieve at Śākyamuni's nirvāṇa nor to concern oneself with the tending of the body, eight kings, elders, and disciples who came from each region took the relics, each erected a stupa, and enshrined the relics within. At this very moment, Buddhist art too can be said to have begun.

  Later, Aśoka of the Maurya dynasty is said to have gathered the relics of Śākyamuni Buddha again and erected eighty-four thousand stupas throughout India. After a period of "aniconism," in which the Buddha's presence was symbolized by the wheel of dharma (法輪), the Buddha's footprint, the Bodhi tree, and the like — without a figural Buddha image — Buddha images in human form appeared around the first century in the Mathurā and Gandhāra regions, during the Kushan rule of India.

  Gandhāran style, influenced by Hellenism, Rome, and Persia, and Mathurā style, formed within the Indian sculptural tradition, each developed their own idioms; and at the Gupta dynasty — which, after the fall of the Kushan dynasty established by a foreign people, was re-established by Indians — they entered another era of remarkable flourishing. In the museum at Sarnath, where Śākyamuni delivered his first sermon at the request of Brahmā after his awakening, there are beautiful and refined Sarnath-style Buddha images of the fifth-century Gupta era. By that time Buddhism had already, through Aśoka's vigorous missionary policy, spread throughout India and on into Sri Lanka, the southern and western Asian regions, and the Hellenistic realms. The Kushans, who had invaded India from the region of present-day Afghanistan, converted to Buddhism and held it with particular devotion; under King Kaniṣka's grand patronage and missionary policies, it was transmitted along the Silk Road to China.

  According to record, our country received Buddhism in the 2nd year of King Sosurim of Goguryeo (372), when Fu Jian (苻堅), king of Former Qin (前秦), sent the monk Sundo (順道) with an envoy. Since Sundo is said to have brought Buddhist scriptures and Buddha images with him, one can say that Buddha images were transmitted to our country through him. Of course, the records in the Samguk Sagi or the Samguk Yusa describe the formal acceptance by the ruling class, so Buddhism must have been received earlier among the common people. In the 1st year of King Chimnyu (384), the Indian monk Marananta came through Eastern Jin (東晉) to Baekje and transmitted Buddhism. Silla, too, after the painful martyrdom of Ichadon under King Beopheung, received Buddhism with difficulty; yet as we can confirm from the record that "in Seorabeol, monasteries and pagodas were as numerous as wild geese," it quickly established Buddhism as a state religion and built great temples such as Hwangnyongsa and Bunhwangsa. Through the Goryeo period, our country took Buddhism not only as faith but as governing ideology, building countless monasteries, Buddha images, pagodas; transcribing sutras and painting Buddhist images.

  Such cultural heritage appears in Shin Jang-sik's works as motif and theme. Having traveled through Lumbinī, Mt. Pragbodhi, Bodh Gayā, Sarnath, Rājagṛha, Jetavana, Veṇuvana, Vaiśālī, Kuśinagara, Nālandā, together with Sāñcī Stupa, Ajantā, and Ellorā — and having encountered Buddha images at museums across many regions — he renders, within his paintings, not only Korean Buddha images but also images of the Gandhāran and Mathurān styles, and from the Gupta-era Sarnath style, those in the realm of samādhi.

  But what meaning would there be if he merely reproduced these Buddha images? What would distinguish such imitation of what already exists from the painter — as Plato spoke of in the Republic — who imitates the phenomenal world, itself an imitation of the Idea? To resolve this problem, he imagined the Buddha-nature spreading through the universe. Consider, as one example, a work in which behind a Gandhāran Buddha holding the dharmacakra-mudrā — the gesture of the first sermon at Sarnath — yet showing the features of deep samādhi, he renders "Cheonsang Yeolcha Bunyajido Gakseok" (the early-Joseon engraved chart of the heavens, 天象列次分野之圖刻石), and to either side places the celestial maidens (bicheonsang) rising with fluttering robes from the Yongjusa (龍珠寺) Brahma-bell — a configuration in which the two flanking celestial maidens transmit Śākyamuni's first sermon (the words of compassion) into cosmic space; this can be called a visual embodiment of the Ubiquitous.

  This Buddha-nature spreading through the universe rises still more dramatically in works that place the Buddha's head within an oval nebula, or in triptych-form works. A work in which the surface is divided into three — on either side, the lithe celestial maidens of the Sacred Bell of King Seongdeok, and at the center, half-length, National Treasure no. 83 (the pensive bodhisattva) with a subtle smile holding the realm of liberation beyond all thought and the wish to save sentient beings — shows a structure in which the bodhisattva suddenly emerges from a deep abyss like a black hole in cosmic space stitched with countless constellations.

  Pictorial considerations also occupy an important place alongside such meaning-bestowing. To bring out the actuality of the Buddha images he has himself seen, he neither alters nor distorts the form; as seen in his painting of the attendant bodhisattva of the Maitreya triad at Samhwa-ryeong, he applies paper pulp to the surface to evoke the texture of granite and renders the shadows. The granite texture of the Buddha images is thus emphasized, while the celestial maidens are rendered in planar, linear fashion, and the candles cut from prints are pasted on — embodying a surface in which reproduction and expression, the three-dimensional and the planar, the figurative and the abstract coexist in harmony. The same can be confirmed in the work where Buddha images of the Northern Wei period from the Maijishan Grottoes are placed facing one another. As if a decalcomania, this work — projecting each other's forms — not only evokes in its content the Buddhist thought of non-duality (不二) but achieves, through the sense of space on the surface, a visual effect of forms dissolving into cosmic space. Toward the center of the surface the forms vanish, and one feels an audiovisual space in which faint, abstract waves of light pulse and are drawn inward, or waves of sound resonate outward.

  From Sarnath to Mt. Namsan, and Back to Oneself

  As he wished to be a wayfaring practitioner, Shin Jang-sik loves to travel. For him, travel is not merely a pause to escape the chains of daily life and recharge, nor a reward bestowed upon a hard-working self. He is one who searches for something, and when the object appears, he sets out on the road in order to remain absorbed in it. At Sāñcī Stupa he discovered the Śākyamuni Buddha of the aniconic age, expressed through the Bodhi tree, the footprint, the dharma wheel; at the Taxila Museum he found the Gandhāran Buddha images where Hellenism and Roman art met Buddhism. At the Sarnath Museum he encountered masterpieces of fifth-century Indian Buddhist art; crossing the Taklamakan desert he met the asceticism of countless seeker-monks who had died on that road. When he saw a cliff-carved Buddha at Gilgit in the Gandhāra region — where Taliban incursions might occur — what was he thinking? The travel we made together was by no means an ascetic ordeal. It might rather have been a happy time that fulfilled the romantic fantasy of the Silk Road.

  After returning from the Silk Road, he went alone to Mt. Namsan in Gyeongju. Attending to the fact that reliefs such as the Seosan Maaebul appear different according to the amount and angle of light, he sometimes visited at different times of day. And not only Buddha images. To find the source-evidence (典據) for his work, he diligently studies Buddhism, so that recently the topics of his conversation are filled with Buddhism. It was the same when he painted Mt. Geumgang before tours to it had opened. He collected, surveyed, and studied an abundance of materials related to Mt. Geumgang and reconstructed it on the surface. After the opening of Mt. Geumgang, this passion, through countless field surveys, also became the driving force that made him "the Mt. Geumgang painter."

  Excessive passion can become attachment, but his painting of Buddha images, too, must be driven by some kind of vow-force (wonryeok, 願力). What might it be? He is not, drawn by religious faith, painting the Buddha as an object of worship. Perhaps he has taken the Buddha image as a means not for the image itself but in order to know the deep thought that dwells within it. Just as Descartes (René Descartes) did, he is aware of himself as one anguished over what he must search for. Because such a desire to know operates as a motive, his work carries an intuitive and at the same time analytic character.

  From Arirang to Mt. Geumgang to the Buddha images, there is no conflict or opposition in Shin Jang-sik's paintings. What he is searching for, as he himself has said, is "the Arirang of hope." Is not art just such a thing — searching for a light that cannot be declared in clear terms but rises faintly into view? To reach it, one may see the object as it is (vipassanā), may concentrate (sati), and may even enter a state of supreme non-conceptual stillness, having released even that concentration (samādhi). The way of art and the way of dhyāna are different. That difference is what makes art rich, but in seeking, beyond the suffering of reality, that which is ultimate, there is something they share. Prajñāpāramitā belongs not to Buddhism alone — is it not also needed in art?

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• Text Review 2007-10-31 · Choi Tae-man

  'From Lhasa to Kathmandu' — Tibet's Nature and Culture in Clear, Translucent Color (2007)

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  Text Review 2007-10-31 · Choi Tae-man

  'From Lhasa to Kathmandu' — Tibet's Nature and Culture in Clear, Translucent Color (2007)

  This exhibition, mounted under the title "From Lhasa to Kathmandu," records my memories of traveling through Tibet with Professor Shin Jang-sik in 2005. The idea took shape as we followed the Friendship Highway (友情公路) linking Lhasa and Kathmandu, leaving Tibet and crossing into Nepal: at the Dhulikhel hotel, within view of Qomolangma — better known as Everest — I proposed publishing a travelogue that would include his works, and Professor Shin readily agreed. After we returned, we each set to work; but with my schedule consumed by finishing 〈A Study in the History of Contemporary Korean Sculpture〉, my own essay stalled at little more than refining the brief impressions I had jotted on my laptop during the trip. What is more, though I am no specialist in Tibetan art, my interest in its history and iconography kept growing, and an immoderate, presumptuous wish to study it further put the manuscript off indefinitely. Meanwhile Professor Shin had completed his works and had to wait nearly a year for the writing to be done. Tibet, too, changed in that interval. In July 2006 the Qinghai-Tibet Railway opened, connecting Beijing through Xi'an, Lanzhou, Xining, and Golmud to Lhasa — a 4,064 km route covered in 47 hours. At the time of our trip the railway had not yet opened, so we flew from Beijing to Lhasa via Chengdu on a Chinese domestic flight. With its opening, the number of tourists reaching Tibet has risen so sharply that the refuse of civilization has become a real concern; though only two years have passed, I am keenly curious how the place has changed. Passing through Lhatse (Latse, 拉孜), I also saw road crews paving stretches that had been unpaved, so the main arteries of this snow-bound plateau must by now be largely surfaced.

  Across the Tibetan plateau it is not hard to find lungta — "wind horse" — flags. On passes and plains, stones are heaped up and cloths of five colors tied above them; for Tibetans who live amid harsh conditions, these "wind horses" may be called an expression of hope and salvation. Watching Tibetans make full-body prostrations before the Buddhist temples of historic cities such as Lhasa or Shigatse, one almost feels they live a life beyond time — and the same feeling arises before the lungta. Bearing every kind of wish — from the health and happiness of family and safety on a journey to the protection of the gods and the rebirth of ancestors in paradise — the lungta, set loose on the wind, carry the heart of the Tibetan people. Nor is that all. The six-syllable mantra (a sacred sound or syllable in Buddhist practice) "Oṃ maṇi padme hūṃ," carved on the mani stones scattered across the Tibetan landscape, brings home how deeply Tibetan Buddhism is rooted as the spiritual pillar of their lives. Seeing the worn figures of Tibetans prostrating up the steep slopes of the plateau, one comes to believe their hearts must be as pure as that region's translucent sky. Lungta and mani stones surely hold those plain yet honest hearts.

  Professor Shin Jang-sik's work carries a clear, translucent color that calls to mind the dramatic contrasts of the Tibetan plateau — its sky luminous and clear, the perennial Himalayan snows flowing down to water a land of relatively abundant moisture. The color reflects his optimistic temperament well. At the same time, his work keeps the fresh scent of earth from those unpaved roads. In it one finds the fluttering of the primary colors seen on lungta, and a reverence for the lives of Tibetans — plain yet hardy, untouched by civilization. Writing keeps straining to explain; painting shows at once. When explanation runs long, it turns tedious and loses its tension. Beside my own prose, which feels secure only when it winds into long sentences for want of literary mastery, his work is spare and without excess. Because it sets down the memory of a journey, it rests on fact; yet it has the power to let us grasp the nature and culture of Tibet without a word of explanation. His work made real my wish for a book that is not only read but also seen, and for that I am grateful. I hope his work, like the "wind horse," may settle into our hearts as well.

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• Text Review 2005-10-26 · Choi Tae-man

  'Light of Mt. Geumgang' — Review by Choi Tae-man (2005)

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  Text Review 2005-10-26 · Choi Tae-man

  'Light of Mt. Geumgang' — Review by Choi Tae-man (2005)

  In 2004, under the title "Ten Years of Longing, Mt. Geumgang," Shin Jang-sik held an interim survey of the Mt. Geumgang paintings he had pursued with unbroken focus for a decade. The optimistic vision — interwoven with the spirited, vivifying brushstrokes and the bright, lively colors that had appeared in works conceived as far back as before Mt. Geumgang opened in 1998 — had ripened into a state of full maturity, and these paintings were clearly the fruit of a decade-long devotion to a single object: Mt. Geumgang. Having served on the production team for the 1988 Seoul Olympics opening and closing ceremonies, he had labored to inherit tradition, and through Mt. Geumgang — even as first seen in photographs — he found a possibility he would pursue as if by fate. These works, which gather the painterly themes he has held to with such devotion, offered the artist himself an occasion for self-examination calling for renewed change, and the result is being cautiously revealed in this exhibition. Above all, the most striking feature is the broadly unfolding landscape, like the grand-scene sansu (daegyeong sansu), and the restraint of somewhat decorative expression in favor of a fidelity to the actual landscape — manifestations of an intent to view and express the true face (jinsang) of Mt. Geumgang from a closer vantage, and of an attitude, after three further visits since the previous exhibition, of remaining faithful to the true-view he had sketched on site.

  That he has internalized the theme of the exhibition from "Ten Years of Longing" to "Light of Mt. Geumgang" likewise carries the intent of approaching the actual ever more closely while at the same time strengthening its symbolic meaning. This light shares something with the light and color pursued by Western Baroque or Impressionist painting, yet his work — alongside its visual transparency — calls us to look back at history and reality through Mt. Geumgang, and is, evidently, drawn from a more spiritual register. That is to say, his landscape painting holds not only the awe of nature but also the history within it and the longing for an ideal that transcends history — and in this lies its significance.

  First, it is worth noting that the very name "Mt. Geumgang" springs from a Buddhist worldview. In Buddhism, geumgang (vajra, 金剛) signifies an unchanging truth as hard as diamond. The Vajracchedikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra (金剛般若波羅密經), a representative scripture of the Seon school, accordingly carries the meaning of a teaching of truth as solid as the vajra, able to cut through and dissolve all things. Though he does not paint Mt. Geumgang from a Buddhist worldview, one may presume that the hours in which he paints it are full of a heart that wishes, through the mountain's form, to know what unchanging truth might be. Furthermore, since Mt. Geumgang bears whole the historical tragedy of the South-North division born of political and ideological conflict, it is worth noting that he treats it not as a merely beautiful object but as a symbolic alternative through which such conflict might be overcome. Though scarred by the calamity of war, the enduring landscape makes one realize how meager and unseemly human greed is. The light of Mt. Geumgang that he probes, then, is not the visible light of physical phenomena but something belonging to the realm of the heart. The four seasons of Mt. Geumgang he paints remain enduring and refreshing, yet within them lie all the trials and glories of history. Even so, he does not grasp the difficulties of the present as suffering and despair alone — he sees the hope that lies beyond them. Light, then, is not only the ray that illumines Mt. Geumgang but the very light of hope we must not lose. In his paintings — undulating ranges, the prominent evergreen pines before them, the snowbound peaks and quiet valleys rippling in near and far — reading his optimistic worldview is not difficult. Yet his beautiful landscapes do not work as a "mechanism of evasion" that would have us forget the real contradictions and obstructions that remain. The real limits — that one can reach Mt. Geumgang only by crossing the fence, that one must hold a separate travel permit, that one may explore only restricted regions — appear faintly through his choices of subject. That he could paint only the places he had visited shows that the tragedy of division remains a stern reality. Nevertheless, rather than presenting division visually, he shows, through Mt. Geumgang's landscape, the layered accumulation of past and present time. In this sense, he waits for the day when he can paint, beyond Sejonbong (世尊峰) — which he painted often in this exhibition — the other faces of Mt. Geumgang. That waiting touches the hope of unification. Because for ten years he has painted Mt. Geumgang with such waiting, for him Mt. Geumgang remains an unfinished project.

  Some may tilt their heads at the fact that this artist has been painting Mt. Geumgang for over ten years. But there is no reason for us to hurry. Gyeomjae Jeong Seon — who rendered Mt. Geumgang in the most Mt. Geumgang-like manner — visited the mountain in his mid-thirties with his teacher Samyeon Kim Chang-heup; he is said to have painted the 〈Sinmyo-nyeon Pungak Album〉 (1711), then the 〈Haeak Jeonsincheop〉, ultimately achieving jingyeong sansu (true-view landscape) and leaving brilliant Mt. Geumgang paintings until his passing — Jeong Seon was a great painter who devoted some forty years to Mt. Geumgang. Considering this, to call Shin Jang-sik's Mt. Geumgang painting his ongoing task — and a mission to convey the meaning and value of landscape painting to those who would turn from it as an outmoded genre — is no exaggeration. It is, therefore, not too much to hope that the light of Mt. Geumgang appears not only as a light shining on the future of unification but as a dawn light that further tempers his body of work. Through this exhibition, I hope that he will not conclude the Mt. Geumgang he has pursued so tenaciously but deepen it further, establishing his own content and idiom.

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• Text Review 1989-08-23 · Choi Tae-man

  Arirang: Self-Affirmation and Generosity (1989)

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  Text Review 1989-08-23 · Choi Tae-man

  Arirang: Self-Affirmation and Generosity (1989)

  The consistent theme that governs Shin Jang-sik's work is the optimistic and realistic will to life rooted deep in the consciousness and emotional fabric of the Korean people. This theme manifests in his work under the title 〈Arirang〉. Arirang is the most representative of all Korean oral folk songs. It is commonly understood as expressing han—the sentiment of sorrow. Yet it is not merely a passive refrain or onomatopoeia that reflects han as a resigned, withdrawn emotion.

  Arirang carries the longing of the people to cross over from the suffering and oppression of present reality into a better future. Take the lyric "I go over the Arirang pass": the speaker is not the lover who abandons and departs but the very subject who crosses the pass. Here, the pass symbolizes a reality saturated with contradiction and hardship. In the end, Arirang expresses the will to overcome such a reality rather than to evade or resign before it. It is neither a distorted lament of grief and tragedy, nor a complacent, optimistic hum. Within it are the emotions that perpetually arise in real life—joy and sorrow, despair and hope, defeat and resurgence, negation and affirmation, anger and forgiveness, the tragic and the optimistic—expressed in composite and total form. Arirang, therefore, can be called a symbol of future-oriented consciousness reflecting the dialectical posture and way of life by which our ancestors accepted and sought to transcend the contradictions of reality through the social practice of labor.

  What Shin Jang-sik attends to in Arirang is precisely this positive worldview that lies hidden within it.

  He has labored to discover the genuine values embedded in Arirang and to express them in his own distinctive language. He has already revealed one fruit of these efforts in last year's painting exhibition at To Gallery and his print exhibition at the 3rd Gallery. To give visible form to the composite meanings Arirang carries, he has studied folk paintings (minhwa), shamanic paintings (musokhwa), and traditional patterns and visual symbols. Such traditional objects—the cheongsachorong (blue-and-red silk lanterns), the obangwisaek (five-direction colors) and saekdong (rainbow stripes), flags, the taegeuk, and religious imagery such as the bicheonsang (heavenly maidens) and lotus motifs—were used in everyday life and combine aesthetic, practical, and symbolic qualities. He reinterprets the meanings inherent in these objects in fresh ways.

  As one sees in the series 〈Arirang — Wish I〉, the traditional objects he introduces into his works function as symbols revealing his affirmative vision. The series is composed of countless simplified candle flames. As the title "Wish" already suggests, the candle is a symbol of purification (jeonghwa) and longing. Though it bears religious meaning, it also carries the practical meaning of an implement that illumines darkness. In its composition, recalling the main hall of a Buddhist temple where countless Buddha statues are enshrined, this work shows numerous candles radiating their small lights toward a great circle centered above, metaphorically revealing one of his core themes: sangsaeng (mutual generation) and unification. It is at once a gathering of humble wishes and the splendor of a brilliance born of small lights converging. This summation of flames is the union of a healthy consciousness rising to shake off suffering and contradiction (darkness).

  The content carried in Shin's work rests on such healthiness. Through cheerful, bright colors and simple, lucid forms, he reveals the content he wishes to express clearly and directly. In particular, he chose the woodblock as the medium that could most successfully bear such content and form within the print medium. The woodblock not only suits his temperament in material and technique but also, as he came to know through experience while producing many kinds of prints, proves apt for absorbing the content he had in mind. He has independently developed a technique called somyeolbeop (the reduction method), thereby surpassing the expressive limits of the woodblock and opening up its richer flavor and possibilities. Through the repetition of cutting and printing, the form that gradually emerges fully reflects the charm of the handmade print. The image acquires a distinctive beauty in which the artist's plan and will combine with accidental effects and even the characteristics of the material itself (the wood grain).

  Shin Jang-sik knows well that the woodblock is the medium most fittingly able to receive the content and meaning he pursues. Furthermore, he actively draws on the fact that wood, as a material, is not exclusive but receptive—he believes that the woodblock can naturally absorb the subjects of his work.

  This strength of his work derives, at its root, from his optimistic worldview. It rests on the conviction that accompanies the spiritual generosity of magnanimity and self-affirmation. He is therefore wary of any vision that grasps art as something supremely transcendent. Such a vision risks veiling art behind an esoteric mystique or subordinating it to abstruse ideas and theories. This is precisely why he loves, especially among traditional objects, those that satisfied both aesthetic consciousness and utility, those widely used among the common people.

  The appeal of his work lies in its positive and active vision of the world and the self—that is, in its securing of the healthiness of consciousness.

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• Mixed Review 1989 · Choi Tae-man

  "Searching for the Pulse of Tradition" — Choi Tae-man Critique (1989)

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  Mixed Review 1989 · Choi Tae-man

  "Searching for the Pulse of Tradition" — Choi Tae-man Critique (1989)

  The Question of Tradition in Korean Art

  The question of tradition in Korean art is not a simple one. Across not only the visual arts but Korean culture as a whole, the problem of the "creative inheritance" or "contemporary recreation" of tradition has continued to be discussed as if it were a self-evident imperative. Yet such a problem-consciousness, the more it stands on a doctrinal ground, is apt to treat tradition not from a historical and social vantage but as something mystical, transcendent, and eternally immutable—something beyond logic.

  The problem of tradition cannot be reduced to vague idealism or to a nominalism that holds it must simply "be such-and-such." Sunk in the abstract slogan of "succeeding tradition" or in nominalism, one risks letting the rich possibilities of tradition lie dormant—merely chewing over what was past or borrowing its surfaces—and thereby rendering tradition itself hollow. To duplicate what existed in the past cannot be called the proper inheritance of tradition: this much is self-evident. Tradition is not something absolute existing beyond eras and history, but something that reflects the needs, demands, tastes, and purposes of its own time.

  Then what is tradition?

  By dictionary definition, tradition refers to what, within custom, possesses historical background and is transmitted forward bearing particularly high normative significance.

  Cultural tradition, in particular, is the accumulated body of values created by human beings—that is, the substance in which material culture and intellectual culture have been integrated, conserving each other, an actual and living entity. It is the fruit of human intellectual and physical labor accumulated and developed by the spiritual values that flowed through long history and the consciousness of communal life, and further, an asset that enriches and elevates the quality of life. Yet doctrinaire traditionalists, refusing to grasp tradition as something dynamic, disguise conservative and archaic academicism as tradition; eclecticists, regarding it only as a static object, gather this and that to fashion hybrids and misconstrue this as tradition.

  These outcomes spring from the worship of false idols in a consciousness that lacks awareness, and at the same time from the trap of disguising subjective notions as tradition while abandoning practical inquiry.

  Discussion of tradition in Korean art has, broadly, proceeded along two perspectives. First, the position that honors the elevated tastes and aesthetic consciousness of the ruling class; second, the attitude that delves into the aesthetic tradition of the common people, rooted in the substratum of our nation's thought—shamanism, the yin-yang and five-elements thought, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism. Both perspectives accept that our nation's self-identity has been maintained without being lost. The former inherits Chinese painting theory together with the academic foundation of the learning of Zhu Xi and Neo-Confucianism imported through China; the latter rests upon shamanism—our indigenous folk faith—while drawing on foreign religions that, though imported, became indigenized. Particularly worth noting is that within the so-called Minjok/Minjung art of the 1980s, efforts have been made to overcome these two perspectives and to recover the tradition of an autonomous, era-responsive, practical, and exuberant art produced by the people themselves.

  In any case, the aesthetic expressions appearing in the implements used for shamanism, divination, prophecy, geomancy, and prognostication, and the aesthetic forms and tastes appearing in the various instruments and tools used in the play of the common people—who, even amid the toil of labor and the calamities of nature, sought to overcome them through play—were, as we know, distinct from the contemplative and speculative tradition of the ruling class. Yet relative to the evaluation and education of the ruling class's lofty artistic tradition, the tradition of the substratum culture, made out of the urgent necessities of life, was not treated with comparable importance. And even where discussion of folk arts such as minhwa was active, it was often in a quasi-mythic vein of veneration. The problem lies in the attitude of viewing and grasping tradition as something fixed; when this limit cannot be overcome, the discussion of tradition only circles at the level of generalities. In this sense, the awareness that tradition is useful even in the present, sufficiently productive and a real asset of the national community, must lead to a practical effort to reproduce it in concrete terms.

  Searching for Tradition: Its Possibilities and Limits

  What lies at the core of Shin Jang-sik's work is "finding our own." For one educated and grown within the conventions and institutions of modern art, this is no small adventure. During his college years he faithfully studied the various norms and rules of so-called modernism and produced his student work within those frames. That such an artist has turned his gaze to tradition and sought to discover his own language within it is an encouraging fact.

  The decisive impetus that turned Shin Jang-sik's interest toward tradition was the 1988 Seoul Olympics. Working as a member of the art staff for the opening and closing ceremonies, he began his investigation and study of Korean traditional art. Those who prepared and ran this event with him are known to have reached a consensus that, at this festival of the peoples of the world, something most Korean must be shown, and to have labored to realize this.

  In that process they set out to find what was distinctive in our national tradition, and on the basis of what they gathered they prepared the opening and closing ceremonies. Yet over a year's work, what he could prepare remained largely within the scope of documentary materials. The decisive limit that a study of tradition through documents can incur is that it may confine tradition to a fixed mold—shifting traditional subjects, rather than considering their utility or content within the traditional context, into a merely aesthetic, decorative register. Even if his participation in the Olympic events provided a turning point that shifted his thinking and direction, the fact that this took place in a highly bureaucratic and quantity-driven, state-led form also lets us measure the limits of his work.

  Still, even before his work on the Olympic ceremonies, Shin Jang-sik had attempted, in his own way, sketches of traditional motifs and of various images named "Korean." Though these were no more than a search in the literal sense, not yet a serious undertaking, this exploration of tradition gave him an inkling that it suited his temperament better than the elaborate and refined logics of modern art. In any case, while still at the stage of merely searching out traditional forms and content, he was able—through consulting with various folk scholars, frequenting museums and private studios, and gathering materials in the course of the great Olympic event—to gain the confidence to draw out his present work.

  What Shin Jang-sik has investigated above all, and applied to his own work, are flags. The flag was chosen during the process of "finding our own," but the special attachment he holds for it comes from discovering in the very forms of various traditional flags—used for many purposes in the past—an inherent force of condensation and emission, and a robust vigor. From the agricultural flags (nonggi) used when the farming economy was central to the social order, to the military banners and the various flags carried in royal processions, each was made and used according to its own reasons, content, and conventions. The question is in what way and within what context such relics of the past can be recalled within an industrial—even post-industrial—modern society. Carelessly, this could remain at the level of nostalgia or reminiscence. But he believes that these flags, along with the various square images our ancestors made, carry a sufficient spiritual background and bear the possibility of developing into new symbols. He invests this belief in the content of his works.

  Take, for instance, the work that is at once most visually compelling and most multivalent in symbol at this solo exhibition: 〈Arirang — Morning〉, in which one feels where his belief is grounded. At the center of the picture, around a resplendently rising sun, sit the colors blue, white, red, and black—signifying the four cardinal directions—wrapped by the flame-tipped form (hwayeomgak; in nonggi this pattern is also called "centipede legs") found in traditional flags. The four directional colors plus yellow—the symbol of the human—are called obangsaek, a symbol of the cosmological view grounded in yin-yang and five-elements thought. The bird ascending within the blazing sun also expresses the consciousness of soaring, whose archetype the artist finds in Goguryeo tomb murals—the murals depicting a celestial maiden holding the sun and ascending; he cites their content and form. The work, then, evidently depicts the majesty of sunrise. The will and the radiation of force to open a new day are crucial features of Goguryeo art, and the same forward-moving and active force is also to be found in Joseon-era works such as 〈Ilwol Busangdo (Sun, Moon, and Mythical Tree)〉. The rising sun above the legendary Obong Mountains makes us feel that hwayeomgak is not a merely decorative element but an iconography symbolizing the emission and absorption of qi. The work, then, is at once a great flag and a symbol of force, and further, a multilayered meaning-structure organized as a wish for an affirmative, active life. Its bright, vivid colors and the form that bears simple yet clear content show, unmistakably, the characteristics one sees in minhwa.

  In this respect, an important driver of Shin Jang-sik's work is, evidently, minhwa—not the dark and negative kind, but the bright, positive, future-oriented kind. Within his flag paintings appear not only such minhwa iconography but also gogok (curved jade beads) that form the taegeuk (the most primal form and the law that governs all things in the cosmos, the very source of all things), and shamanic and folk-religious icons such as the rooster and the bangsangsi face, drawn with apotropaic intent. The do (an instrument used to wish for abundance under the agricultural economy) and the humorously reconfigured 〈Tal〉 derived from the lion of the Eunyul Saja-nori can be read in the same vein.

  The generous and affirmative vision in his works yields a delight different from what works born of suffering and anguish convey. That his work does not stop at mere interest but also lets us infer more meaningful content is where his strength is to be found. Moreover, his criticism of reality is expressed by hidden means—through satire and humor—which is also worth noting. The only problem is that his work too strongly carries a diagrammatic aspect. Because of this, one cannot quite shake the impression that the intended content is not fully and dimensionally embodied but laid out in a flat, explanatory enumeration. Such an impression is also to be felt in the slight protrusion of the flag from the picture plane, with its background handled in a contemporary-feeling drawing. The pencil-drawn backgrounds and the overly decorative addition of tree branches likewise seem to carry the limit of a certain eclecticism. The real question is, however: how much persuasive power can the iconography he seeks to express carry within this modern social life of an industrial society? Since this is what he himself regards as the task he sets himself, no clear conclusion can be expected at once. We can only say that we must together study how a developed seedling method might be found—reflecting upon what easily forgotten soil and constitution remain in this vast field of modern art, and then growing them again—and how a result fit for our climate and environment might be brought forth.

  

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