Misulbipyeong, Shin Jang-sik 〈Mt. Geumgang〉 — Review by Kim Jin-a (1993)

Under the theme of Arirang, the artist Shin Jang-sik has devoted himself to expressing elements of Korean tradition—flags, cheongsacho lanterns, janggu and other drums, and the five cardinal colors (obangsaek). In this exhibition, however, he moves beyond a representational treatment that merely puts tradition on display: he gives sculptural form to Mt. Geumgang as a spiritual resonance and, through plant life, reveals the overflowing vitality and prayer of Arirang in a more metaphorical way.

Two immense panels of Mt. Geumgang unfold across the gallery. They seem half-wrapped in mist; were it not mist, one would have to peel away a single dazzling layer of sunlight. Then the mountains rise quietly into view. The cliffs split facet upon facet, clad in motley reds, yellows, greens, and blues like a child's rainbow coat. Only then do these finely fractured planes call to mind the painter Jeong Seon. The contour lines have surely absorbed Jeong Seon, yet the whole belongs to the artist's own formal idiom—a process of hammering paper-mulberry pulp by hand to lay the ground, lifting forms and filling them in, then scattering pigment once more across the surface—out of which emerges a Mt. Geumgang newly our own. The mountain forms, exuding a serene atmosphere of Seon (禪, Zen), merge with a contemporary pictorial language, at once Korean and refusing to be merely Korean. Yet there, unmistakably, echoes the longing of Arirang that must cross the pass toward reunification.

The concept of Arirang to which the artist has held fast is not an expression of the passive sentiment of a people who endured long and bitter centuries, but a hope and a national vitality—gathering as one, praying for the road ahead, and singing it. Works drawing on the 'sea pine' of Jeju and the 'juniper' of Onyang lay bare the life force of the trees themselves. The artist now connects the vitality of Arirang not through direct mediators such as the janggu or the drum, but through the very life of trees and grasses. And that living energy brings even the air and the reaches of cosmic space to life.

In 〈Arirang〉, that vitality expands all the way to the stars. Viewed up close, the drawn constellation-lines may even feel schematic; but step back a little and they sink into a sown, sprouting texture, and within an infinitely expanding indigo space, yellow stars rise stride by stride toward the viewer. Whereas his works tend to give a strongly closed impression—thick contours that reveal form, and the dense fields of color that fill them—here one glimpses the possibility of an opening.

Of late the artist is keenly attuned to the sound of the woods around his studio. On the road home from the countryside, wildflowers caught suddenly in the headlights speak to him. Their forms, never felt in daily life, take hold of him. An eye held open, free of fixation on subject matter, receives a charged field of communion that lets him approach things more deeply—so that a single object becomes a cry that reflects the whole world. At a glance it may seem unrelated to our tradition, yet the expression of 'gi' (氣) steeped within it, and the unadorned mountain forms, are unmistakably ours. If anything, it renews our regret that another lineage—one that sets out from the old formal language of Jeong Seon to inherit and transcend it—has been severed in our art world.