〈Shin Jang-sik's 'Mt. Geumgang' and Cézanne's 'La montagne Sainte-Victoire'〉 — Kim Jin-a review (2010)

Anyone who has seen Shin Jang-sik's 〈Mt. Geumgang〉 will, at some point, have thought of Cézanne's 〈Mont Sainte-Victoire〉. And perhaps the similarity has felt more obvious than the difference between the two. Most strikingly, both Shin Jang-sik and Cézanne have worked on a particular mountain over a long period.

Even so, such seemingly obvious similarities are in fact only superficial. Rather, Shin Jang-sik's 〈Mt. Geumgang〉 stands at the opposite pole from Cézanne's 〈Mont Sainte-Victoire〉. First, what Mt. Geumgang means and what Mont Sainte-Victoire means are utterly different. Mt. Geumgang surely has personal meaning for Shin Jang-sik as well, but the Mt. Geumgang he paints is, above all, "our" mountain. Cézanne's Sainte-Victoire, by contrast, is above all Cézanne's own mountain.

As the priority of "us" for Shin Jang-sik implies, communication with the public matters to him. Cézanne, to paint the mountain that was real to his own senses — the mountain as it appeared to him — would sometimes distort the actual mountain. Some of Cézanne's 〈Sainte-Victoires〉 are steeper and far more massive than the real mountain; others are flatter and broader. For Cézanne, the mountain is the mountain real to his own senses. Shin Jang-sik's 〈Mt. Geumgang〉, on the contrary, is a mountain anyone can see and recognize — a mountain familiar to us.

There may be a tendency to interpret Shin Jang-sik's theme of "Mt. Geumgang" in terms of grand subjects — the search for tradition or the expression of national character — rather than the focus on communication. Some may also approach more concrete and individual themes such as the political reality of division or the national hope of unification. But to the extent that Shin Jang-sik has himself emphasized that the priority of his work is the community of "us" and that communication with it stands at the core, what should come first to mind when one faces his work is the place of that "us."

To say that, in seeing an artwork, we meet the artist directly is, literally taken, too romantic. But to see the artwork as an independent thing unrelated to the artist or the viewer is neither commonsensical nor desirable. We see the artist, surely, through the artwork. Though we do not meet in person, we follow the traces of the artist's gaze, sensibility, and thought through the mediation of the work. Shin Jang-sik's 〈Mt. Geumgang〉 perpetually invites communication between the artist and us.