"10 Years of Longing for Mt. Geumgang" — Kim Jun-gi Critique (c. 2003)

It is said that in ten years even mountains and rivers change. When the sun turns ten times, the marks of time settle in, and the line between what changes and what does not becomes visible. That an artist should steadily pursue a single theme through the ten years in which "even mountains and rivers change" must be because there is an urgency commensurate with the value of those years. Within the context of Shin Jang-sik's own work, this exhibition carries a singular meaning as the site that surveys his changing relationship with Mt. Geumgang over the past decade. It is the place where one reads the bold traces of an artist's body of work around his fortieth year.

To look back over the ten years of Shin Jang-sik's Mt. Geumgang paintings is to do more than survey an individual artistic journey. It has already been five years since the sea route opened to Mt. Geumgang, that once-forbidden land. Now even the land route has been added, and this process of upheaval will draw closer to us at ever-shorter intervals. In this sense, Shin Jang-sik — who began to paint Mt. Geumgang ten years ago — deserves to be counted as an artist endowed with one of the painter's vital virtues: foresight. Considered not only in the pictorial context of Mt. Geumgang but also in its cultural and political weight, the "ten years of longing" rendered by a painter who confronts the unrelenting reality of division opens a far wider interpretive horizon.

Looking back, at the threshold of the twenty-first century, the dark history of contemporary Korea lying behind the simple fact of painting Mt. Geumgang was a violence beyond imagining. How many were the absurdities and repressions of the divided era? When one thinks of the late-1980s movement for unification, or the South-North relations that began to break that darkness, it all feels like a distant tale. There are beautiful memories from the summers of 1988 and 1989. The student movement of the Jeondaehyeop era, which staged actions around June 10 and August 15, opened the discussion of unification on a broad scale, even mobilizing the tactic of yeonwa (a chain of lying-down protest). Students prevented from reaching Panmunjom formed a human chain by lying on the hot asphalt — an extraordinary performance. The successive unification actions, culminating in the visits to the North by Mun Ik-hwan, Lim Su-gyong, and others, played a great role in breaking the repressive atmosphere that treated even the discussion of unification as subversive. Set against today's news of land tourism to Mt. Geumgang and visiting delegations of hundreds to Pyongyang, those times feel like a story from another country.

Picturing students lying on the asphalt, one chain-link torn away after another, the scene feels almost romantic. Among the various memories of that time, one is especially vivid. Tens of thousands, in their stylish stride, shouted slogans: "Let us go North, come South, meet at Panmunjom." Or, with measured solemnity, they sang protest songs and spoke of unification with grim resolve. The brilliant public oratory of Lim Jong-seok, the Jeondaehyeop chair who was the heartthrob of high-school girls; the burning tears of student Kim Jung-ki, who is now a film actor — these are signs that voice the sensibility of that age. Quite apart from such ferocious gravity, there was another song they would sing back to childlike joy as if holding a festival: "Off to Mt. Geumgang, the twelve thousand peaks. The more one looks, the more beautiful and wondrous. The mountain that changes its lovely clothes with the seasons. Its very name beautiful — Geumgang, Geumgang." A kind of folk-friendly event that brought the vague, distant story of unification close in a familiar voice. Mt. Geumgang, which had lodged itself there as a romantic sensibility within that solemnity, now stands before us as a tourist product one can visit whenever one wishes.

Shin Jang-sik's Mt. Geumgang painting runs through this political and social shift that is being recomposed in a wholly different dimension from the past. From here, I wish to widen the focus of reading Shin Jang-sik beyond a purely pictorial interest into the perspective of "the place of art linked to its social context." From the outset, his Mt. Geumgang painting emerged as an extension of his pictorial journey. This remains, ten years later, a vital matter that runs through his work. As a text bearing the formless values of animation and shinmyeong (exalted spirit, a Korean sense of inspired vitality), the landscape might just as well have been Mt. Baekdu, Mt. Jiri, or Mt. Hallasan. Indeed, one must recall again that all these mountains, by the hands of many artists, have taken their place as historical and political landscapes.

Shin Jang-sik organized his pictorial course — which had developed around subjects symbolizing traditional values — into Mt. Geumgang. Begun ten years ago, this work was accompanied by research on Mt. Geumgang painting as a pictorial value. The works of that period — of which one could without exaggeration say they were gwannyeom sansu (conceptual landscape in the East Asian sansu tradition) — were tenuous in the connection between actuality and form, and must have drawn doubtful looks from those around. The artist's efforts to overcome this appeared as research into old Mt. Geumgang paintings and the gathering of photographic materials, but a landscape painted without on-site experience was inevitably, perhaps, a painting in the head rather than in the heart. Where one cannot draw out the sensuous experience gained through actual encounter, naturally several devices that heighten painterliness would be needed, in keeping with the dicta of self-referential modernism. Indeed, his mid-1990s works exhibit, in fitting coexistence, devices that exemplify such a hypothesis. The Mt. Geumgang paintings of that time were merely visual devices placed at the symmetrical center of paintings adorned with candles or grid patterns. Even those that wholly contained only the mountain landscape coexisted with bolt-and-nut motifs or repeating cross-shaped signs affixed to the surface, and the landscape was veiled within the freewheeling dripping technique. Mt. Geumgang paintings of softly fading color-fields and rough contours were themselves nothing other than visual signs without concreteness.

He first painted Mt. Geumgang in 1993 and held five solo exhibitions on the Mt. Geumgang theme before the opening of Mt. Geumgang tourism in 1998. Among them, the black-and-white photograph published in the 1996 exhibition catalog — the artist looking off into the distance, cigarette in hand — quietly shows him standing at the clear fork between gwannyeom sansu (conceptual landscape) and jingyeong sansu (true-view landscape). A painter standing before the wire fence of the armistice line carries the air of one who longs for, or foresees, crossing it soon for Mt. Geumgang.

In short, his Mt. Geumgang of that time, overpowered by pictorial aims, could only suspend its signified content, yet it neither remained within the territory of representational painting nor folded inward into autistic formalist modernism. To put it differently: painting Mt. Geumgang while burying it within pictorial devices, yet not collapsing into those devices, his work carried the possibility of being taken forward in a more affirmative sense as Mt. Geumgang painting.

The art critic Shim Sang-yong read Shin Jang-sik's Mt. Geumgang paintings of that period as more interested in returning to the plane than in attaining the concreteness of Mt. Geumgang. The meaning of Mt. Geumgang as one conceptual sign-subject is also clearly revealed in the words of commentator Yu Si-min, who dared to remark that "for Shin Jang-sik, Mt. Geumgang is only a tool of aesthetic communication." But it is not so simple. Art, too, is the work of human beings — it stirs and lives. As I see it, Shin Jang-sik and Mt. Geumgang have turned from mere ideational visual signs and have gradually deepened their concrete engagement with the actual.

The Mt. Geumgang paintings after his visit differ from those before in many ways. First, gwannyeom sansu can now turn into jingyeong sansu (true-view landscape). His recent works are jingyeong renderings of Mt. Geumgang, made from materials he gathered through his own sketches and photographs on site. What I mean here by "the turn from the conceptual to the true-view" is the process of finding "the union of actual landscape and painting." As mentioned, even before his actual visits he was developing his own distinctive formal idiom in painting Mt. Geumgang, and this idiom now meets the true-view to open into a new horizon of aesthetic appropriation. He began Mt. Geumgang painting by borrowing the mountain as a symbol, and through Mt. Geumgang he spoke of hope and animation. Even before painting Mt. Geumgang, he had labored through the 〈Arirang〉 series to graft the values and aesthetics of tradition onto contemporary art. His reinterpretation of tradition appeared sustainedly in images of Gwanghwamun, Geunjeongjeon, and the cheongsachorong (traditional blue-and-red silk lantern). In that light, for him — who varied formal methods so amply — Mt. Geumgang must have been more than a mere landscape.

The pictorial changes seen in the new works lie above all in reducing his signature dripping technique and drawing out the savor of brushwork. Compared with the typical method of dripping over the form filling the surface and then again repeating the form and the dripping, the recent works draw out the very savor of the brushstrokes that render rocks and trees, restraining the dripping or omitting it altogether. It is a brushstroke experiment one might dub the "oil-brush junbeop (oil-brush adaptation of the traditional brushstroke conventions of East Asian landscape painting)." Considering the manner of old paintings — paper, ink, and brush, with the stroke of a single flick — these paintings, with hanji (traditional Korean mulberry paper) applied to canvas and the stiff oil brush leaving its trace in acrylic paint atop it, deserve particular interest. The landscapes painted thinly, almost like watercolors, appear to bear intact the traces of true-view sketching done while moving in and out of Mt. Geumgang. The contour lines and dotwork drawn in strong blue pigment carry characteristics on a par with the dripping. It is also of great interest that the new works draw out, in part, the virtues of traditional ink-and-light-color painting. They have extracted the effectiveness of a representational technique in which the form of the mountain is rendered along the flow of its veins and the valleys are emptied through the method of negative space.

That the surface, once divided by color-fields, has moved much closer to representational painting is another point of difference. Where before the elements of color-field dominated, now elements of point and line predominate. Compared with the dripping method, the preservation of dot and line carries a clearly distinct character from the earlier works in which Mt. Geumgang was painted as concept, and the obverse of its ideationality was supplemented by self-referential painterliness.

The fact that what he is painting is a world he has personally experienced has led to a confident painting grounded in vivid experience. This is fully apparent in the five-meter monumental work 〈Mt. Geumgang Manmulsang — November 21, 1998〉. Paintings grounded in actuality lead the painter's hand toward another register. In the case of the 4.5-meter painting 〈The Baekdudaegan as Seen from Mt. Geumgang〉, where a panoramic sansu cannot be captured even with a wide-angle lens, the artist composed several photographs with computer correction and used them as a ground sketch; here one sees an effort to reduce distortion and to approach the true-view through representational expression. This, conversely, also attests to the artist's serious reflection — alongside his visual interest in the objects observed (Mt. Geumgang, the Baekdudaegan) — to read the qi of this land. The interest in how to bring the form of the mountain itself, as the subject of painting, onto the surface is a phenomenon that necessarily arises once the conceptual sign-subject of Mt. Geumgang has been replaced by the true-view Mt. Geumgang.

To speak — through Mt. Geumgang — of the animation of nature and the people, and further to take up concretely the contemporary and on-site (the situation including division) — this is the singular possibility that Shin Jang-sik's painting cannot abandon. It is the work of attaining, through the union of symbol and actuality, an authenticity that runs through life and art. The meeting of his distinctive formal idiom with the actuality of Mt. Geumgang is drawing out another register of artistic maturity. Shin Jang-sik approached Mt. Geumgang as a symbol and has now met its actuality. To paint the mountain yet to surpass the register of so-called representational sansu — that of merely transcribing the mountain — may be the principal task of "contemporary artist" Shin Jang-sik. Yet he has sought to step out of that frame, toward reading the actuality of Mt. Geumgang.

Is art not a trace of life? The artwork, as the byproduct and witness of an artist's life, shares the existence and fate of its maker. Over the past ten years, Shin Jang-sik has not so much revealed himself as an artist through radical formal experimentation as fashioned a fine vessel that bears his own idiom and steadily pursued the clear water suited to that vessel along a single road. The artist speaks of that road obliquely: "if there is even a small authenticity, the shame would be less." The autonomy of art that ruled the twentieth century has reached a condition in which it can no longer stand alone. The works of artist Shin Jang-sik have widened their horizon as an aesthetics of communication that, even under the reality of division, speaks of new meetings and hope — and thereby have opened a broader road ahead.