〈Arirang〉

The artist Shin Jang-sik introduces motifs that carry traditional iconographic meaning, drawing on an aesthetic consciousness grounded in the people's sensibility to generate colors and translate them into pictorial form. This vein of work expands across his planar, object-based, and three-dimensional pieces — and here we trace his process of binding the lineage of tradition to the contemporary modernization of folk sensibility, and seek out its significance. ⟨Editor⟩

Shin Jang-sik's exhibition arrives as a genuinely timely show, prompting reflection on the position Korean art should hold after the Olympics — and on the kind of pictorial idiom that, as a regional language within the world, might forge international resonance.

The Seoul Olympics — like geological shifts or canyon-edge dwellings that those living within them cannot perceive but observers at a distance can read as immense transformations — have sent powerful ripples our way. Recall the many foreign exhibitions held in Korea after the Olympics: from the Soviet Contemporary Art exhibition to the Hungarian Contemporary Art show, the Eastern European exhibitions including those from Yugoslavia, the encounters with the work of Ardian Konti, and the German Impressionist prints exhibition; together with the Bauhaus retrospective and a German contemporary painting show overwhelming in its sheer scale — even a German contemporary painting exhibition a few years back, expected to be difficult to arrange, is worth noting. Whatever the circumstances — whether foreign artists deemed our $10-billion-surplus emerging industrial nation worth investing in, or were moved by the civic spirit Koreans showed during the Olympics, or whether nations now feel we are 'worth adding a line' to their résumé — like the gates of Joseon opening to the great powers in our era of enlightenment, large-scale exhibitions and heavyweight artists are pouring in.

In the midst of this upheaval in the art-world map, Shin's exhibition reveals the 'possibility' of embodying what is ours while simultaneously globalizing what is ours. To make clear why I stress the word 'possibility,' let us examine the idiom Shin employs. Shin's paintings are composed of ordinary words — vocabulary we use unconsciously in everyday life — assembled into images that might be called narrative or symbolic.

First, let us look at our everyday language. It divides into the language of designation, the language of meaning, and the language of concept. For example, when we say 'this is a chair,' the word 'chair' is a designative language that points to a name. But when we say 'a chair is a chair,' it becomes a language of meaning that points to functions that may not even include a chair as such. Going further, if we speak of 'the chair used at the execution ground,' the situation imparts concepts such as glory or death.

Following this rough division as it applies to Shin's paintings: 〈Tal-Ⅱ〉 (Plate 1) corresponds to the language of designation. Despite his efforts toward material and expressive direction, what comes to mind first are heavy, named identities — a club-bearing mask, a mask of escape from grace and grudge, a recognizable name. 〈Ⅰ — Banishing Spirits Ⅲ〉 (Plate 2) can be seen as corresponding to the language of meaning. Just as the emphasis falls on 'something to sit on' rather than 'a chair,' the concrete designative language of 'spirits' and 'banishing' is replaced by the apotropaic vocabulary of phoenixes and feather standards (辟邪). 〈Arirang — Joyful Day〉 (Plate 3), by contrast, can be likened to the language of concept. No concrete designative language is visible. The composition, with its warm colors as keynote, may be read as the form of janggu drums and folding fans, or as the three-color taegeuk and figures of brushes, where form is divested of name and emerges as a figurative word that concretizes the abstract noun 'Arirang.'

Read in this order — 〈Tal-Ⅱ〉, 〈Ⅰ — Banishing Spirits〉, 〈Arirang — Joyful Day〉 — Shin's painting deepens, and one might feel that 〈Arirang — Joyful Day〉 embodies the highest language he has shown, or even the method for expressing the essence of Korean art. Yet these languages remain everyday language put to use as the language of art.

What then is the language of art? I would venture to call it a Meta-Language — language gathered from words we use without much resistance. Not, of course, in the linguistic sense of language used to analyze language, but in the sense of a Hyperlanguage (超言語) that transcends everyday language. On that premise, I note that this meta-language expresses the title of a poem or the state of a piece of music. Let us look at how meta-language can be formed in Shin's 〈Arirang — Morning〉 (Plate 4).

If we attached a commentary like, 'the auspicious sun where the sacred bird dwells casts solemn radiance over the twelve thousand peaks of Mt. Geumgang, driving away darkness in the clear morning,' would it not become an overly narrative prose form? It is true, of course, that designative vocabulary of this sort is visible in the painting. Let us regard this prose as the world of an algebraic function and differentiate it to extract its meaning. To say, 'the auspicious morning sun that breaks the darkness of the homeland,' is plainly to let designative language slip in. Sun = bird, darkness = a black plane, the form of the twelve thousand peaks — these are linked by at least relations of inequality, or must pass through a process of distillation. Let us differentiate this language of meaning once more. Condensed to 'auspicious morning of the homeland,' what we find — like the legs that snakes do not have — is the cumbersome bundles of light invisibly cleaving the darkness. Even when a certain proposition emerges in the conceptual language of 'morning of Arirang,' to bring out the title-like compression of 〈Arirang — Morning〉 the work must, through several rounds of thought and differentiation, shed its excess; only then can it appear as an image that might match the lively notes of a song, shoulders dancing. In fact, what Shin imagines as Arirang differs from this dreamy inference: what he knows as Arirang is, by his own experience, a certain desolation or anguish — the wails of wandering spirits in the underworld pressing on the present heart so it cannot move — though this experience is hardly something one can impose on everyone.

Returning to the theme: it is clear that Shin's paintings emphasize narrative everyday language more than the meta-language we call the language of art. Why then Shin's paintings? What is it that draws the gaze to Shin's paintings?

⟪That Shin can introduce everyday vocabulary and yet make us feel a sticky Korean scent is an orientation toward the Korean smell of sweat. That he chooses woodblock printmaking by the reductive method is, for the Korean body, in a way a natural and inevitable outcome.⟫

I find in Shin's paintings a certain frisson. It seems akin to the elation that comes upon discovering something fresh. The feeling of finding, in an unexpected place, something more eye-catching than expected — as one living today in this country, as a Korean — is, in my view, the most practical and concrete means of approaching the world; and to my eyes Shin's paintings have stood out as something fresh. If the basic strategy by which Korean artists might leap onto the world stage is to make the people of the world pause, draw close, want to touch, want to buy, and want to remember or own, then Shin's pictorial world is fully capable of forming inner resonance. And that resonance is not only the Korean feeling that 'this must be what Korea is like'; even those who do not understand Korean sensibility, if they understand the idiom of a citizen of the world, may well feel that fresh frisson in Shin's paintings and the urge to draw close and touch.

Once more: that Shin can introduce everyday vocabulary and yet make us feel a sticky Korean scent is an orientation toward the Korean smell of sweat. That he chooses woodblock printmaking by the reductive method is, for the Korean body, in a way a natural and inevitable outcome.

In producing multi-color prints by the reductive method, instead of using several plates one gradually carves down a single plate, pulling a set number of impressions — a technique well suited, I believe, to a Korean disposition that is itself native to printmaking. The reason the Tripitaka Koreana was carved on wood rather than set in metal type, when one thinks about it, is that for Koreans, lowering the body and devoting long, sincere effort yields something of faith; the result is a transparent consciousness and pure spirit, and naturally connects to a one-time completeness. Wood was therefore chosen, and to relish the sense of fulfillment that comes from the sustained, Korean embodiment of spirit, what we might call the 'reductive' — a one-time carving — is performed.

Building on the experience and reflections of Shin's exhibition at Toh Gallery, the woodblock prints by the reductive method are now shown at The 3rd Gallery. Let us watch how much of everyday language Shin can stockpile for the sake of meta-language, and how effectively he can articulate a Korean world-language.

The consistent theme that governs Shin Jang-sik's work is the optimistic and realistic will to life rooted deep in the consciousness and emotional fabric of the Korean people. This theme manifests in his work under the title 〈Arirang〉. Arirang is the most representative of all Korean oral folk songs. It is commonly understood as expressing han—the sentiment of sorrow. Yet it is not merely a passive refrain or onomatopoeia that reflects han as a resigned, withdrawn emotion.

Arirang carries the longing of the people to cross over from the suffering and oppression of present reality into a better future. Take the lyric "I go over the Arirang pass": the speaker is not the lover who abandons and departs but the very subject who crosses the pass. Here, the pass symbolizes a reality saturated with contradiction and hardship. In the end, Arirang expresses the will to overcome such a reality rather than to evade or resign before it. It is neither a distorted lament of grief and tragedy, nor a complacent, optimistic hum. Within it are the emotions that perpetually arise in real life—joy and sorrow, despair and hope, defeat and resurgence, negation and affirmation, anger and forgiveness, the tragic and the optimistic—expressed in composite and total form. Arirang, therefore, can be called a symbol of future-oriented consciousness reflecting the dialectical posture and way of life by which our ancestors accepted and sought to transcend the contradictions of reality through the social practice of labor.

What Shin Jang-sik attends to in Arirang is precisely this positive worldview that lies hidden within it.

He has labored to discover the genuine values embedded in Arirang and to express them in his own distinctive language. He has already revealed one fruit of these efforts in last year's painting exhibition at To Gallery and his print exhibition at the 3rd Gallery. To give visible form to the composite meanings Arirang carries, he has studied folk paintings (minhwa), shamanic paintings (musokhwa), and traditional patterns and visual symbols. Such traditional objects—the cheongsachorong (blue-and-red silk lanterns), the obangwisaek (five-direction colors) and saekdong (rainbow stripes), flags, the taegeuk, and religious imagery such as the bicheonsang (heavenly maidens) and lotus motifs—were used in everyday life and combine aesthetic, practical, and symbolic qualities. He reinterprets the meanings inherent in these objects in fresh ways.

As one sees in the series 〈Arirang — Wish I〉, the traditional objects he introduces into his works function as symbols revealing his affirmative vision. The series is composed of countless simplified candle flames. As the title "Wish" already suggests, the candle is a symbol of purification (jeonghwa) and longing. Though it bears religious meaning, it also carries the practical meaning of an implement that illumines darkness. In its composition, recalling the main hall of a Buddhist temple where countless Buddha statues are enshrined, this work shows numerous candles radiating their small lights toward a great circle centered above, metaphorically revealing one of his core themes: sangsaeng (mutual generation) and unification. It is at once a gathering of humble wishes and the splendor of a brilliance born of small lights converging. This summation of flames is the union of a healthy consciousness rising to shake off suffering and contradiction (darkness).

The content carried in Shin's work rests on such healthiness. Through cheerful, bright colors and simple, lucid forms, he reveals the content he wishes to express clearly and directly. In particular, he chose the woodblock as the medium that could most successfully bear such content and form within the print medium. The woodblock not only suits his temperament in material and technique but also, as he came to know through experience while producing many kinds of prints, proves apt for absorbing the content he had in mind. He has independently developed a technique called somyeolbeop (the reduction method), thereby surpassing the expressive limits of the woodblock and opening up its richer flavor and possibilities. Through the repetition of cutting and printing, the form that gradually emerges fully reflects the charm of the handmade print. The image acquires a distinctive beauty in which the artist's plan and will combine with accidental effects and even the characteristics of the material itself (the wood grain).

Shin Jang-sik knows well that the woodblock is the medium most fittingly able to receive the content and meaning he pursues. Furthermore, he actively draws on the fact that wood, as a material, is not exclusive but receptive—he believes that the woodblock can naturally absorb the subjects of his work.

This strength of his work derives, at its root, from his optimistic worldview. It rests on the conviction that accompanies the spiritual generosity of magnanimity and self-affirmation. He is therefore wary of any vision that grasps art as something supremely transcendent. Such a vision risks veiling art behind an esoteric mystique or subordinating it to abstruse ideas and theories. This is precisely why he loves, especially among traditional objects, those that satisfied both aesthetic consciousness and utility, those widely used among the common people.

The appeal of his work lies in its positive and active vision of the world and the self—that is, in its securing of the healthiness of consciousness.

This work depicts the joyful day through the image of swaying cheongsachorong (blue-and-red silk lanterns), rendered in woodblock print. The direct subject comes from the closing ceremony of the 1988 Seoul Olympics: the final program, "Annyeong (Farewell)," where every performer and spectator waved these lanterns to celebrate the success of the Games and to bid farewell to those returning to their homelands. I redesigned the lanterns in a contemporary form, based on those preserved at the Dankook University Costume Museum. The multicolor woodblock prints were produced using somyeolbeop (the reduction method), newly adapted here to woodblock printing.

Arirang is the folk song that most fully represents the emotional landscape of the Korean people. Rather than emphasizing han—the sentiment of sorrow—my intention is to express the spirit of hope and will that carries one over the Arirang pass.