"Shin Jang-sik Exhibition" — Yang Jeong-mu review (2001)

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• Text Review 2005-07-01 · Yoo Si-min

  "The Joy of Having a Painter Friend, Shin Jang-sik, the Aesthetics of His Communication" — Yoo Si-min Critique (2005)

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  Text Review 2005-07-01 · Yoo Si-min

  "The Joy of Having a Painter Friend, Shin Jang-sik, the Aesthetics of His Communication" — Yoo Si-min Critique (2005)

  By a widely held preconception, the artist is, in one way or another, different from ordinary people. Among them, the painter is regarded as a particularly "difficult eccentric." How far this preconception matches the truth I cannot say, but from my personal experience it does not seem an entirely groundless prejudice.

  First, there is the matter of the work-space. The studio of a poet or novelist evokes an old-fashioned bookcase packed with books and a desk strewn with manuscript paper. A pianist's practice space is bound up with images of a glossy instrument, sweet sound, and long elegant fingerwork. A painter's working space, however, resembles those tiny back-alley "machikoba" (small workshops) in Mullae-dong that deal in metal building materials. Canvases and tools lie scattered everywhere, and the unfamiliar visitor hesitates to step in. If the master of the studio loves drink, empty bottles with cigarette butts inside take their share. If he is a poor "anonymous painter," instant-noodle cups with dried residue at the bottom will surely roll about. Unlike the works hung in galleries, encountering "the scent of art" in a painter's studio is not easy. At least, that is what every painter's working space I have known has been like.

  The painter himself is no different from his studio. As a student I once saw, in the school art-room corridor, a teacher who had stayed up all summer night working — bare-chested, holding a Bacchus bottle in his mouth, stretching. In today's parlance, it was indeed "eopgi (bizarre)." Each in his way, the "people who do painting" I have known were absorbed in some "matter" I could not understand; what that matter was, despite all my eavesdropping, I never could grasp.

  Things being made by "such people" in "such studios," works too are no easy thing. From the days when I first peeked into exhibition halls to gather pamphlets for vacation homework until now, I have become a "hypocrite who keeps up appearances" before art works. There was a work, for instance, that I thought depicted "a fly on a wide wall," while a friend with me insisted it was "watermelon seeds spit out on the floor." Grumbling to myself "what sort of painting is this!" I still stood for at least two minutes with my eyes lightly closed before the work. Rather than immersing myself in the work, I was on edge, careful that the others in the same space not catch on to the fact that I am a philistine who knows little about art. Ah, the way of the cultivated person is indeed an arduous one!

  This is not, in truth, a matter to be borne by me alone. Having spent days and nights wrestling with calculus formulas and statistical numbers under the pretense of studying economics, my chances to smell the scent of art were few; but if painters had been more diligent in speaking out — if a broad, everyday communication had existed between artists inside the art world and ordinary people glancing over the fence — surely even I would not now be so timid about stepping into the space where an art exhibition is held.

  By that "widely held prejudice," Shin Jang-sik is certainly an exception. At least, he is for me. Among many reasons, the most decisive is that he ceaselessly speaks to those living outside the world of his profession. Even when I do not entirely follow him in logical terms, I can, through the work and his expression and tone, "in my own way" surmise the aesthetic sense and message he is trying to send across the fence. This is because Shin Jang-sik is, contrary to "the widely held prejudice about painters," "ordinary, all too ordinary." Whether holding a "common aesthetic code" that lets him communicate without trouble with "outsiders to the art world" is a great strength or a fatal weakness, I do not know — but to tell the truth, that is how he is.

  I dare say it: Shin Jang-sik is an artist of extraordinary "communicative ability." He showed this gift early on, from his student days. The friends who attended a Daegu high school with the curious name Simin (心印) in the mid-1970s will, every one, have bought a sheet or two of the bizarre New Year's cards Shin Jang-sik made. The "Shin Jang-sik-brand New Year's cards" — featuring the Hahoe mask, dragons, lotus patterns, thatched cottages, and children mimicking Lee Jung-seop — enjoyed enormous popularity, supported by their low price and high "artistic dignity," and thanks to this "popularization of art," he secured pocket funds for creative activity every winter vacation.

  Not having been blessed with wealthy parents, the New Year's card business was for Shin Jang-sik a crucial "supply route." With these funds he procured what he needed for oil painting. Possessing both artistic talent and material infrastructure, Shin Jang-sik became the only one among some five hundred classmates of his year to paint in oil. If memory serves, it was the winter vacation of his second year. Too young to qualify as an exhibitor, he submitted his oil painting under his older brother's name to the Gyeongbuk Provincial Art Exhibition. Though no major prize, it nonetheless took an award. He "communicated" this secret quietly, and the friends caught in that secret network ran in a pack to the exhibition hall. As I recall, it was a painting in which porcelain ware, an apple, and a quince lay on a table.

  Shin Jang-sik had countless "communications" with "outsiders to the art world," and the most decisive in his life was carried out in the corridor of a reading room somewhere in central Daegu in the spring of 1977. The problem was the family's opposition to his entering art college. By many indications, had he given up art school, his likely destination would have been the College of Commerce at Kyungpook National University. With the strong support and encouragement of his friends, Shin Jang-sik convinced his parents and went on to art college. Of the friends who, with no doubt that he would succeed as a painter, urged him to set his will, not one is now in an art-related occupation. They became accountants, lawyers, office workers, university professors, freelance commentators. They held that conviction because of his "communicative ability." Had he chosen otherwise, Shin Jang-sik might now be sitting at a desk in a bank branch, stamping seals on newly issued large-denomination checks, regretting the choice he made twenty-five years ago. Meeting good friends — even in an artist's life, this is one of the great fortunes!

  From around 1988, Shin Jang-sik painted flags, cheongsachorong, lotus patterns, and various other traditional motifs — things resembling what he had seen long ago at the village shrine of his maternal hometown — and later printed the same as woodblock prints. Then he painted Bukhansan and Gwanghwamun. For the past several years he has painted only Mt. Geumgang. "What is ours," "tradition," "historicity" … art critics seem to analyze and ascribe meaning to his work through such concepts. But knowing well that Shin Jang-sik is no nationalist who especially venerates national tradition, I do not think those concepts alone sufficiently explain why he paints such subjects. Traditional motifs, the cheongsachorong, Gyeongbokgung, Bukhansan, Mt. Geumgang — these, in my view, are no more than tools of his attempted "sotong (communication)."

  Shin Jang-sik is an ordinary father with one son and one daughter, and a most diligent husband who keeps house with the woman with whom he dated almost daily — who, surely, also painted. He is "a thoroughly normal middle-aged man" with no peculiar political leanings or eccentric habits. He weaves the life of an artist and the daily life of a man without any noise. Among friends he balances well the moments to listen quietly with the moments to make his case. He commits neither the folly of subordinating art to something else, nor the opposite error of severing it from history altogether. In a word, Shin Jang-sik is a "sound citizen" of the Republic of Korea, a painter pursuing "broad aesthetic and emotional communication" with his contemporaries.

  A truly outstanding artist creates "something" that has not existed. The new "something" can be conceived through eccentricity beyond imagining or through the absolute solitude of facing the wall (myeon-byeok), but it can also be the product of incessant communication (sotong) with others. Because Shin Jang-sik is not suited to eccentricity or wall-facing — a "sound, all too sound citizen" — I believe that the works he has made and will make are all the products of the deep and wide "communication" he has shared with family and friends, with neighbors and contemporaries, and with history.

  This belief brings the joy that only the believer can know. Before Shin Jang-sik's works, I look for traces. Somewhere in the new Mt. Geumgang paintings, too, there must surely be traces of the "communication" we have shared together. The joy of feeling those traces in the heart — this is the inalienable privilege of one who counts as a friend an artist who fattens his soul through "communication with others."

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• Image Feature 2001-09-04 · Artist's Blog

  Shin Jang-sik 〈Meditation — Mt. Geumgang〉 — Installation Views (2001)

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  Image Feature 2001-09-04 · Artist's Blog

  Shin Jang-sik 〈Meditation — Mt. Geumgang〉 — Installation Views (2001)

  Installation views of Shin Jang-sik's solo exhibition 〈Meditation — Mt. Geumgang〉, which opened as the inaugural show of Kookmin University Art Gallery in September 2001 and continued at Wooduk Gallery. The set includes views of the eight-canvas 〈Mt. Geumgang Manmulsang — 1998.11.21〉, 〈Mt. Geumgang from Sangpaldam〉 (681×181 cm), the eleven seated hanji 〈Meditation〉 figures, and exhibition-related materials (including the Monthly Art Magazine advertisement preserved by the artist).

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

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• Text Review 2001-08-01 · Kang Tae-seong

  "Mt. Geumgang, 'para-doxa'" — Kang Tae-seong review (2001)

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  Text Review 2001-08-01 · Kang Tae-seong

  "Mt. Geumgang, 'para-doxa'" — Kang Tae-seong review (2001)

  Outside the room where I am now staying, between spaces of modern Baroque and Neoclassical style — at once austere and ornately decorated — several very narrow paths thread along. Like chimneys, the narrowly opened passages assail one's nose with the acrid exhaust of cars. What I feel here is the parallel coexistence of past splendor and present "smoke." Such parallel coexistences appear together with historical relics — the current G8 summit in Italy and the killing of one who took part in the anti-globalisation movement — and make legible a structure in which several axes of meaning coexist. This coexistent and paradoxical structure is visible in the works to be shown at Shin Jang-sik's forthcoming solo exhibition, and the parallelism now made visible lets us think of his multilayered structure all the more meaningfully.

  The works to be presented in this exhibition take Mt. Geumgang as their subject. For us, Mt. Geumgang carries more than the meaning of a famous mountain. It is at once our famous mountain, a fact of division, and yet another demilitarized zone (?). It is a space where the limited freedom of visiting is felt as tragic, and at the same time a "paradoxical" place felt as beautiful. That is, it is the place where countless circumstances and histories of our modern era are interwoven, and a symbol of the sharp and intricate political situation now unfolding between South and North Korea and across Northeast Asia.

  Such a subject is further emphasized in contrast with its meaning as history — with the temporal axis to the past. The artist began to paint "Mt. Geumgang" from the time when we could not go there. Mt. Geumgang was a "nature" to be recovered — that is, Korea's nature — a space holding our hopes and our circumstances, while at the same time being the "empty space" we could not visit. The contents of such a subject appear in the exhibition through various works. The beautiful form of Mt. Geumgang appears in painting; the various critical, meditative, and reflective meanings — as varied situations — appear in the three-dimensional works.

  His work 〈Mt. Geumgang Manmulsang — November 21, 1998〉 is divided into several panels, with landscape and figures partially overlapping. The figures are South Koreans who accompanied the artist, linked to meanings outside the painting — the political, economic, and natural-environmental context. The work, while wholly the same Mt. Geumgang in overlapping space, is staged through a "set-apart," severed character that shows a different face from the present condition between South and North. The set-apart space, the severed surface, lets the viewer infer a more fragmented circumstance and brings us to recognize the present condition: a place that is at once our land and not — one that cannot be visited and yet has come to be visitable.

  This artist holds a vision different from past Korean modernist art. As one sees in his "meditation" and cheongsachorong (traditional blue-and-red silk lantern) subjects, his work begins from a relation with the contexte (con-text) — that which lies outside the painting. That is, his work links historical character with sociality and other contemporary traits (con-temporary). Here, too, we may "consider" together the "con" of contemporaneity and context. I take the "con" (cum), meaning "with," to think of the "other thing or person" as something simultaneously relational, and I read Levinas's other "self" (alter ego) as a relational comprehension of the other. The other is not only an independent absolute unit but a being that, while another self, is at the same time mutually relational and contextual. The relationship of beings — humans, and the others to be with — within a new context, the possibility of harmony, can be spoken of in his painting. Such an understanding and reflection upon context gives his work a structure of discourse spoken together with the context outside the painting, distinct from a wholly self-referential modernism.

  What draws still further interest here is that the context presented in the work is offered paradoxically rather than serving the merely referential function of pointing to the "present reality" outright. As one example, the theme and subject of "meditation," together with the figures in the installations, juxtaposes facts from different time-axes. The parallelism in his work may be read as a still more parallel opinion (para-doxa). In the works he made while observing and painting Mt. Geumgang during his several visits, one can grasp the parallel character of Korea — the meaning of South and North — and the very unnatural space separated within that parallel condition. And yet, because Mt. Geumgang is the beautiful mountain that is the pride of our people, in its many contextual meanings it is also a paradoxical (paradoxe) space.

  His painting, within this parallel space, shows two frames: "present reality / negation." The reality may be seen as the representation the subject carries, and through the parallel display it acquires the meaning of negation. The parallel revealed in this juxtaposition is the state in which two distinguished units are kept just as they are. That is, parallelism is the maintaining of several units unmixed — carrying meanings of "distinction," "severance," "rupture." In his series of paintings, there is a fundamental difference between the acts of "painting" and "flinging" lines, and this emphasizes the parallelism.

  The flung lines repeatedly form a sparse space tangled in varied colors — yellows, reds. Seen from afar these colors appear richly varied, but up close one finds, alongside the colors, countless needles thrust through the surface, arriving with a meaning utterly different from that of the distant view.

  His paradoxical, parallel space is dually constituted along the distance between close and far points of view. The earlier painted layer and the later layer in his paintings can likewise be understood through this same duality. This duality is "paradox," carrying negation. In this case, the two distinct characters carry expressive heterogeneity while presenting the character of negation. Such negativity contrasts in mode of expression — the painted line and the flung line, the intentional line and the line in which the unconscious and chance partake — and presents a multilayered consciousness. This space of multiple meaning and expression paradoxically emphasizes a "double-layered narrative structure."

  The figural casts taken from the artist himself are arrayed in parallel within the exhibition space. In their beautiful yet somewhat dreadful appearance one finds his paradoxical character (autumn leaves — bruise), and the plurality of meaning can be grasped through parallel viewing. The dual character of far and near — the painted mountain and the flung paint layer atop it — can be read as a dual structure.

  That is, the relation between the first painted layer (A) and the later flung layer (B) yields two parallel meaning-relations — the same dual character as that of close and far in the cast figures. Here, importantly, an order of meaning arises. His priority is the side that appears first — the view from afar; the structure read afterward becomes the latter narrative. These two distinct structures read before and after do not seem to be the kind of subject in which one chooses between them selectively. Rather than an "a or b" meaning-structure (a selective structure that is true if either a or b alone is true), it is an "a and b" structure. This is the coexistence of "a and b" — what Plato termed the meaning of "negation," "alteration," the structure that "others" things. His work, in that sense, can be called a difference between two things — a difference in distance, a difference on the surface.

  The identity and repetition discovered in the repeated presentation of multiple identical figures — figural casts of the artist arrayed across the exhibition space in heterogeneous variety — compose a complex meaning-space. Seen from afar, the sculptures shimmering like fish-scales of actual needles (the scale-needle structure) and the autumn-leaf — bruise (colors that appear, from afar, as beautiful as autumn leaves and, up close, like the impression of bruised blood) — these dual-structured sculptures are shown in parallel. That is, they convey "stacked sounds" of varied meanings, or accumulated significations. Such works open a space of negation and paradox — "stacked sounds" — distinct from the "stillness" the theme of "meditation" implies. His parallelism and paradox can be read as carrying a most significant meaning in the present unfolding of art.

  — Kang Tae-seong, August 1, 2001

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