What Shin Jang-sik shows in his work is the preciousness of what is our own. Although he has held several exhibitions, most of them have been devoted to finding our own face. In his second solo exhibition in 1989 (Toh Gallery), he experimented with traditional patterns and various images that might be called Korean; in his sixth solo exhibition in 1991 (Shinsegae Gallery), he developed traditional patterns in contemporary ways while mining the emotions embedded within those patterns.
This exhibition is clearly an extension of that flow. The theme of the work, no exaggeration, is to remind us how valuable and how noble what is ours truly is. In an era of such rapid and unpredictable change, his work may seem out of step with the times — yet, in pointing out what contemporary art tends to overlook and in striving to address the fundamental questions of Korean art, it is profoundly suggestive.
But what are the formal mechanisms the artist summons to visually examine this grand and essential matter — the inheritance and development of tradition? He finds and draws upon those mechanisms from very ordinary places. The images he introduces are mostly linked to folk beliefs or daily customs. There are folk images such as the rainbow-striped jacket worn by a child at their first birthday, brightly colored cheongsa-choreong lanterns, the flame patterns of a Buddha's halo, candles and wood spirits — symbols of prayer for good fortune — alongside natural and crafted images such as cockscombs, ceremonial gongs, window patterns, and winter trees.
These images, without needing arcane terms to explain, are clearly chosen to express what is uniquely ours. Permeating these attempts is his particular interest in tradition — that goes without saying. But however precious the tradition, without the artist's distinctive 'interpretation,' it would not move the viewer. It risks ending in nothing more than rhetoric and obligation; for this reason, we must look closely at how he approaches the question of 'interpreting' traditional images.
He begins with thoroughness in his interpretation of tradition. Rather than presenting form or idea in isolation through non-empirical methods, he displays a meticulous, precise relating of every element to the theme from the very start of his process. Watching the artist work: he first dissolves hanji-paper pulp in water, then attaches the liquefied paper along the contours of a pre-drawn underdrawing or fixes only the necessary portions to build up texture; only after this groundwork is complete does he establish the outline of the form and begin layering the obangsaek (the five colors that symbolize the Korean cosmology). Material, color, and form are all organically bound to the theme. At times he incorporates objects such as old coins, writing implements, and thread, or attaches mosquito coils. These should be understood not in terms of formal concepts like 'substitution' or 'materiality' but in connection with custom (a child reaches at their first birthday for a coin and becomes a merchant, for a writing brush and becomes a scholar) and with the embodiment of unseen qi (the mosquito coil giving form to invisible vital breath). The objects themselves are repurposed as indicators of an Eastern way of life and cosmology.
One thing that distinguishes him from artists who hang 'Koreanness' on their banner — whether directly or indirectly — is the very concrete and analytical nature of his approach. He summons various patterns to reduce ambiguity and raise clarity; this can sometimes make the work tend toward the enumerative and explanatory, but it also reinforces the transmission of his thematic intent. The warm tactility of hanji and the brilliance of the patterns work in proper harmony to amplify the thematic effect. A historicized development of this thematic consciousness is the large-scale work depicting Gwanghwamun — significant for its scale, and also offering material by which we can measure his recent concerns. That 'concern' is, beyond any doubt, the matter of 'the lost national fortune.' The edge of the former Government-General building (now used as the National Museum) hangs over the magnificent upper section of Gwanghwamun, and through it Shin presents, as a kind of commentary, the regret of an unhappy colonial era — a clearing of Japanese remnants that we still only proclaim but fail to enact. The artist's intent — that to recover what is truly ours, the residues of Japanese rule must be excised — is clearly reflected in the work.
To place such emphasis on the virtues of tradition and on historicity within the theme, the artist seems to treat the other elements — contingency, spontaneity, imagination, the mysterious — as relatively unimportant. As a result, viewers experience clear signification through his work rather than a richness of emotion. One thing one might wish for him is that, alongside emphasizing this signification, he also pour care into the formal devices that let viewers feel the unrefined, plain, and natural fragrance of what is truly ours — less precise but humble and natural. When we encounter the rich aroma of national sentiment as in the earthen warmth of nameless potters' unaffected vessels, the thematic dimension of his work will become far more effective. In short, the theme needs to pass through a folkloric filter of form — and this is the task I would leave him with for his future work.
