Artist Note by Shin Jang-sik — "Beyond the Sorrow-Soaked Arirang Pass: Toward a Lively Homecoming" (mid-to-late 1990s)

For a painter, the hometown is an important place that yields many cues for understanding the artist and the work. Many of the great modern masters created their formal vocabulary from the hometown of their own heart. My case will be no exception.

Where is my hometown? Where is the source from which I will create my own formal vocabulary?

When I think of my hometown, certain images come naturally to mind. The Suseongcheon stream that ran along the road, the trees of the land, the front mountain that could embrace my small body, the shrine at the bend of the road leading to that mountain, the small cave where a dragon was said to dwell, the rocky cleft that was the hideout of our play, the Suseong fields we made for when mountain play wearied us — chasing frogs and grasshoppers. In those days, those fields could not have been wider.

But these images changed as I grew up, and the hometown I imagined changed with them. From one summer day on, one could no longer bathe in the Suseongcheon. The figures of mothers washing laundry there disappeared. The face of the front mountain turned into roads and apartments. The shrine at the bend of the road to the mountain vanished. The small cave where a dragon was said to dwell no longer looked as though a dragon could possibly live there. The roads were paved with asphalt; the water was embanked.

Where is the hometown of my heart? When I was in middle school, I would take part in the Silla Cultural Festival held in Gyeongju. The art competition held in Gyerim during the festival was always an excuse to visit Gyeongju, and I would always join. The color of the dawn sky as I rode the early bus to Gyeongju, I cannot forget. Its progress toward a brightness beyond words, through the fading starlight, was a resonance of the soul. It was the rhythm of life that quickened the traveler heading toward a new world.

Something in Gyeongju always drew me — the broken-down face of our old culture and nature that I could still feel there. Perhaps my steps toward Gyeongju were so light because I could, without knowing, feel the shape of my heart's hometown there.

The time I grew up in was always under construction, always being built. The elementary school I attended was an overcrowded "bean-sprout" classroom, a construction site where new classrooms were being raised. In middle school, too, we studied amid the sound of explosions and bulldozers as a mountain was being cut down to make a playground. While I prepared for the college entrance exam, the corridor beside our classroom was being fitted with new windows, and the auditorium remained under construction for the full three years; barely the graduation ceremony was held there. At university, the road I had to bump and rattle along to attend was paved, and the buildings completed, only around graduation. Even now I sometimes see it — having ridden buses across iron plates over the gashed road, I had become an adult. From my childhood hometown to the time I became an adult, things were always under construction. Whether they will remain so, I do not know …

Where is the hometown of my heart?

Has it been buried beneath that construction site, beneath that asphalt? The time I grew up in was the time of rapid industrialization, of taking in Western culture. Mountains changed, factories were built, houses changed, and people grew more pressed. In the midst of all this, the face of our hometown changed — bulldozed away, buried under concrete and asphalt …

At this moment, as the downpour of Western culture is passing, the mind of mine that goes in search of the hometown of our culture feels like a new wind — like the rhythm of the dawn sky on the road to Gyeongju.

We must seek the hometown of our heart. Surely the root is still alive somewhere, under that asphalt-before-paving.

What did I study at university? I was busy learning the language and spirit that the downpour of Western culture had brought. To know it sooner than others was the only way to be reckoned with. The result was a chain of imitations, and the creation of our own new visual language was impossible.

Where has our formal vocabulary gone?

Now we must seek it. At this moment, as the downpour of Western culture is passing, we must bring our own language back to life. That is the way to revive the hometown of my heart, and to revive our culture. Not the indiscriminate imitation of Western culture, but expressing my own emotion and sensibility in our own forms — that is the way to create our hometown turned toward the twenty-first century.

The theme of my work is "Arirang." Arirang is a word that stands for the native sensibility of our people, our traditional way of seeing the world and things. The core of my Arirang work is to embody, on today's horizon, the intrinsic force and health that tradition carries. Tradition is what is vivid and exuberant, formed by the urgent demands of our life. What I have especially attended to and applied in my work is the various formal vocabularies formed in our substratum culture: the aesthetic expressions appearing in the implements used for shamanism, divination, prophecy, geomancy, and prognostication; the aesthetic forms and tastes appearing in the various instruments and flags 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; the truthfulness and unaffectedness seen in minhwa (folk painting) …

Founded on shamanism — our people's indigenous folk faith — and grounded in the indigenized foreign religions (Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, the yin-yang and five-elements thought), I discovered a healthy force in the tradition of the substratum culture made by the necessities of life. I found the face of the hometown. But to recreate this within my own work, it had to be brought forth not as a fixed, immutable form bound to the past, but as something whose meaning-structure must be newly revealed from the standpoint and horizon of today. The core of that meaning-structure is, I believe, the vitality of harmony — the very face of the hometown. Yin and yang, water and fire, heaven and earth, even good and evil are not seen as opposing elements; rather, their collision integrates into one great vitality, expressed as a healthy force that harmonizes and reconciles.

Such a force can be symbolized in Arirang, the song that speaks for our sensibility.

"Arirang, Arirang, Arariyo I go over the Arirang pass."

Thus, in the Arirang that speaks for our sensibility, the hardship, han (the deep Korean sentiment of unresolved sorrow and resilience born of historical hardship), and sorrow of crossing the passes of history are contained. But from our present standpoint, I think we must emphasize not such sorrow but rather the will and hope of crossing the pass. Rather than thinking of a fallen hometown, we must seek a hometown with force and spirit (shinbaram).