〈Mt. Geumgang〉

Through several recent solo exhibitions, the unusual depth of Shin Jang-sik's attachment to "what is our own" has by now been openly stated. Even before any discussion of its formal accomplishment, the questions surrounding the artist—represented by the 〈Arirang〉 series—of "tradition and iconography" (Park Shin-ui, Choi Tae-man, Kim Young-jae), "Koreanness" (Seo Sung-rok), and "decorativeness" (Oh Byeong-uk) have been considered chiefly from the side of subject matter. Where the artist's intent is so directed, this orientation of interpretation is naturally to be expected. Moreover, the formal vision Shin embraces, which resonated with the fervor of "finding our own" around the time of the Olympics, has been positively received by many.

Over the past several years, alongside the formal possibilities for a historical consciousness in the artist's work—especially in painting that includes the woodblock—critics have offered the following warm-eyed hopes for him. To begin with, Park Shin-ui, on the works in Shin's 1989 solo exhibition (To Gallery), noted that "the depth of symbolism is still shallow … the angle of interpretation upon the iconography is also not yet comprehensive." Choi Tae-man pointed out that his work "carries too strong a diagrammatic aspect" and raised the question of how much persuasive power such iconography could possess "within this modern social life of an industrial society." Kim Young-jae, reading the iconography of the same exhibition from the standpoint of language, gave a positive future-oriented appraisal: how far can the artist "shed everyday language" for a "meta-language or trans-language" as visual language—how effectively can he "express a world-language that is Korean"?

On the works of last year's solo exhibition (Gallery Icon), Kang Sung-won found that the character of the artist's painting, including its iconography, "did not seem to depart greatly from the aesthetic dimension of an institutionalized traditionalism" and expressed hope that the artist would prioritize "the work of uncovering the true face" of traditionality and Koreanness, which has been refracted and occluded in many ways through the 1970s–80s. Finally, Seo Sung-rok stressed the necessity of a "more rugged, plain, simple, and naturally redolent formal apparatus" and of "a process of passing the subject through the filter of more genuinely folk forms."

It is hardly the case that all of these essays correctly diagnosed the artist's problem, nor—even if they had—could they be the decisive elements forecasting or directing his future. To begin with, the abstractness of language is such that these critical texts can come across to the artist as too thinly concrete to translate into practice. With the exception of Kim Young-jae's linguistic vantage, most of the essays emphasized Koreanness and folk character through the iconography of the subject and the depth of its symbolism, leaving the impression that resolving these would carry the artist to his own formal advancement.

Yet on the formal plane, I place my hope in Shin Jang-sik's plastic consciousness through the converse claim—that, in order to keep alive a genuine subject-consciousness of traditionality and Koreanness, the artist must in fact boldly cast off "what is his own" and "what is our own." That is to say, his consciousness of folk character and Koreanness, as it has appeared, should have been more deeply hidden formally; it should have been kept in an extremely ambiguous form of objectivity within still more entangled, doubled and tripled symbolism.

Such works are, of course, to be found among his earlier pieces. For instance, 〈Arirang — Morning〉 of 1988 (fig. 1) lays out the front and side forms of the janggu drum in iconographic fashion, lining them up in a single row on the plane. From a certain angle this conveys a purely formal feeling like that of Jasper Johns's American flags—an iconographic form rid of cultural subject-consciousness, taken purely as an objective object. Likewise, the mosquito coil used as a plastic substitute for 〈Arirang〉 between 1991 and 1992 (fig. 2)—an object that condenses the artist's distinctive wit and decorative sense—shares the same conception. The visual form of "Arirang" with its subject-consciousness lifted out, paired with the sound of the word, somehow feels as though it should be curling and coiled; by substituting an industrial product utterly unrelated to the idea of "Arirang" with that image, the artist achieved an effect of neutralizing his own subjective subject-consciousness and plastic consciousness.

Apart from a few such cases, his subject-consciousness was, in the past, perhaps too strongly exposed. Compared with that, this solo exhibition at Gallery Icon shows that the artist's objectivity—his way of approaching the subject and the form that holds it—has grown, and one can feel that the artist's intellectual seriousness in exploring subject and material has matured.

Shin Jang-sik's interest in "what is our own," which began with the expression of folk paraphernalia (1988–90), has gradually moved toward a Koreanness as historical consciousness embodied in large, artificial structures (architectural forms) during 1991–92. Yet these structures inevitably exist in close relation with the surrounding nature, and the artist must have felt the urge to express nature itself in its bare-being. This appearance of nature usually takes the form of landscape, and the Eastern sansuhwa—the mountain-water painting—occupies a place quite distinct from the Western landscape in spiritual terms. The artist's turn, with 〈Mt. Geumgang〉 as its central subject in this solo exhibition, can be seen as a desire "to put into painting not the heavy, artificial, animal energy of structures, but some energy that approaches quietly, that is still and plant-like—yet within itself tense and full of vitality."

I do not regard this shift in subject-consciousness—toward primarily plant-like images, including 〈Mt. Geumgang〉—as a result of a merely outward change of subject. While his formal vocabulary has not changed in stylistic terms, at least the artist's visual consciousness—the gaze that beholds "Koreanness," "tradition," or "folk character"—has matured and expanded to the point of distinguishing between the plant-like and the animal-like; this is, perhaps, an almost unconscious testimony that the room for the artist's objectivity toward any object of observation has correspondingly grown.

This is also clearly visible in the motivation by which the artist resolved to paint 〈Mt. Geumgang〉. The feeling he received from seeing 〈The Painting of Mt. Geumgang〉 (fig. 3) by Gyeomjae Jeong Seon, in the collection of Korea University Museum and shown last year at the National Museum, along with Jeong's other "plant-like images," was, he says, scarcely different from what he had felt on seeing minhwa and folk paraphernalia. In other words, before the questions of subject or content, or the "Koreanness" and "traditionality" laid upon them, Jeong's sansuhwa came to him as a question of form and structure. Beyond the platitude that, hemmed within ideological bounds, one cannot even see—let alone paint—that famous landscape ("there is no Mt. Geumgang before a full stomach"), I believe the decisive motivation lay in the artist's visual independence and objectivity, which allowed him to observe Jeong Seon's sansuhwa from the standpoint of form and structure.

As though uncovering historical fact, Shin Jang-sik gathers and compares visual materials of 〈Mt. Geumgang〉 from past and present that will be inscribed in his own mind, and gains the confidence to draw out a form of his own. Drawing, for instance, on the 〈Mt. Geumgang Photograph Album〉 from the colonial period (fig. 4) or the 〈Mt. Geumgang〉 footage filmed and broadcast on television by a women's delegation that visited the North last year (fig. 5), he excludes all narrative subject matter and seeks—much as in Jeong Seon's work—to present a structural form of mountain divided into countless facets and, through the artist's signature dripping technique that neutralizes the manifestness of that form, to bring forth a mountain of an auspicious feeling transcending eras.

On the formal plane, where the previous works took frontality and symmetry as their structural skeleton, with decorative and iconographic elements emerging too prominently, these "plant-like images" markedly relax such elements. In the past, the structural frontality reinforced a certain austerity, and the symmetry added a tension to the picture plane, all consistent with the artist's subject-consciousness; but since the artist's subject-consciousness has shifted toward expressing in plastic form a plant-like energy that grows tough, that quietly holds an invisible inner strength, the elements that propped up iconography must in turn recede.

In the end, where the narrative approach to subject was once a considerable burden, by pursuing the pure conceptuality of matter—and so working out the question of pure visual form as the question of conception itself—the artist will, I believe, come to encounter a new plastic vocabulary capable of bearing his transformed subject-consciousness.