Shin Jang-sik's painting is decorative. His work is neither tedious nor pedantic, neither ugly — it brings ease and pleasure to its viewer. That pleasure is utterly natural. His art seeks to be pure painting, and to be 'our' painting. It is born where pure painting meets tradition: the framework of pure painting — which has banished literariness and historicity from art — converging with the emotional content of Korean myth, symbol, and folk life. The encounter produces a hybrid bearing the properties of both — an unfathomable compound.
What is art? When we are moved by a painting, when we feel something, when we are delighted — where does that arise from? Does it come from the content of the painting? If so, then it is not the pure feeling that painting itself gives; it is dependent. The feeling of painting must exist independently of the linguistic or narrative content the eye absorbs, and pure painting is the pursuit of this to its limit.
In the late nineteenth century, the brothers Goncourt asked of the essence of painting: "Is painting a book? Is painting an idea? Is it a visible voice, the painted language of thought? Do paintings speak to the brain? Can the aims and acts of painting be dematerialized through color, impasto (empâtement), and glazing (glacis)?" (E. et J. de Goncourt, L'Art du XVIIIe siècle, Hermann, 1967, p. 211.) And they answered: "Painting, destined to seduce the eye, gives material vigor to a single fact, sensuously reproducing the object — striving not to depart from the rest of the optic nerve." Then: "Does painting offer intellectual or spiritual emotion to the human being? Not at all! It offers only material pleasure to the eye. Nothing more." (Journal, April 29, 1886.) They concluded: "Painting is the material art of giving life to form through color."
The discussion of art's substance — that a work consists of its material body and the content it carries — begins with Hegel and had already become widespread by the mid- to late nineteenth century. By the time the Nabi painter Maurice Denis claimed that a painting is essentially a flat surface covered with colors arranged in a certain order, the move felt natural: art had begun to advance in search of its own pure form. When art parted from the other arts and sought to keep its purity — no longer serving religion, no longer recording history, with literariness removed — what remained for painting was canvas and lumps of paint. And yet painters could express what they wanted with these alone.
The Neo-impressionists discovered formulas in the harmony of color and stroke. A picture of delight, for instance, was dominated by light and warm color, with strokes rising in an upward direction; a calm picture balanced light and dark, warm and cool, with horizontal strokes; a tragic picture was dominated by darkness and cool color, with descending strokes. Further variation could be drawn through gradations and scatterings and by adjusting the size of the touches. For them art was harmony — the harmony of complementary colors, of modulations, of tone and color. They were chromo-luminarians who pursued this harmony.
From its seed in Impressionism, this pure art advanced — through composition-first painting such as the Pont-Aven school and the Nabis, and through Fauvism — toward its essence. Early Cubism arrived at flat painting that pursued only the harmony and composition of line, plane, and color, and would soon advance to pure abstraction that no longer required an object. That is to say, twentieth-century European painting could not but become decorative; the most important property of pure painting at that moment was decorativeness.
Decorativeness is a necessary condition of a work, but not a sufficient one. Whatever the goal of pure art, viewers seek to fill psychological cravings as much as visual ones. They want to find in the work something familiar to them, something recognizable, something deeper than what is in front of their eyes. This connects directly to the questions of ethnic identity, tradition, or simply theme that have re-emerged in art.
Shin Jang-sik's art was rooted in the conditions of contemporary reality. He depicted the underside of modern society — alienation, contradiction, oppression — in a realist mode. The decisive turn toward purity in his work came through his participation in the art direction of the 1988 Seoul Olympics. While preparing the opening and closing ceremonies that so elegantly and engagingly drew out the image of Korea, Shin glimpsed a new possibility for his art. His conviction that art should be grounded in lived reality rather than the importation of Western art led him to excavate traditional decorative and religious painting — and to breathe contemporary life into what had remained locked in the past. His discovery would have satisfied two of his desires: first, the planarity and decorativeness that mark the central characteristic of twentieth-century painting (which does not reproduce three-dimensional space); and second, the actuality, the rootedness in our own lives, that lends art its particularity. He had found, in short, the still-unrefined territory of 'a contemporary art that is our own.'
Shin further modernizes the tradition he excavates and revives through his distinctive treatment — light, web-like lines; banding at the edges of the canvas; small blue-red-black-white squares in the four corners that lend balance and decorativeness to the picture plane while preventing the emergence of three-dimensional space — and at the same time he dismantles and recombines the iconographies and symbols of traditional decorative and religious painting, expanding their meaning. For him 'our tradition' is a wide concept. It can be the rainbow-striped jacket of a baby's first birthday, or a cheongsa-choreong lantern; the lotus that signifies purification; the flame-pattern halo of a Buddha; or the sacred tree of legend. These are not concentrated in any one place but scattered throughout our daily lives — dissolved into our emotional fabric.
The dual aspect of Shin's work — the successful joining of contemporaneity, planarity, and decorativeness with tradition, reality, and theme — is what enabled him to create his own artistic world. It is the world of the 〈Arirang〉 series, already visible in his 1989 solo exhibitions. Under the large theme of 'Arirang,' Shin integrated all the varied subjects above into a single body of work, expressing not the sorrow but the joy of the Korean people, not adversity and hardship but the challenge of the future and hope.
He elevates our ethnic emotion to a higher dimension by housing it in his refined and sensitive artistic system. There is no need to fear that the use of a symbolic system makes his work less pure, or that the rigid frame of pure painting is an awkward vessel for tradition. We are not in a position to judge whether form or content is more decisive in painting, nor do we yet know what kind of art it is that we are seeking; what makes art possible is the diverse, passionate attempts toward the unknown. Shin, who seeks to take root in our tradition and reality while aiming at pure painting, will, I believe, continue to wrestle with and refine the pictorial language now beginning to flower — and create a more truthful art.
