〈Mt. Geumgang — Life Force〉

Shin Jang-sik, who took as his subjects the cheongsachorong and Gyeongbokgung and other distinctively Korean motifs in his search for the beauty of Korean tradition, has been working under the theme of Mt. Geumgang since 1993, and this past September he again held a solo exhibition on the same theme at Pyo Gallery.

Before his two direct visits to Mt. Geumgang last year and this year, he could only paint Mt. Geumgang based on a handful of photographs, and so his work showed an ideational quality. With ridges replaced by deep lines, valleys by bright colors, and forms simplified, the stylized, decorative side stood out. In this exhibition, his distinctive expressions remain, but a shift in expressive character can be observed.

As in 〈Mt. Geumgang — Vitality (Heaven's Gate)〉, 〈Mt. Geumgang — Vitality (The Avalokiteśvara Peaks Seen from Cheonseondae)〉, and 〈Mt. Geumgang — Vitality (Manmulsang)〉, the contrast of light and dark that brightly renders the sun-touched slopes of the mountain gives a stronger sense of actuality than before. 〈Mt. Geumgang — Vitality (Manmulsang)〉, while retaining stylized elements from the past, shows that his expression is being newly turned toward sketch-based observation.

This shift in stylistic expression based on actuality also changes the meaning of "decoration" in his painting. Here I compare the word "decorative" to its Latin root decere — meaning "to be fitting, to suit." In this exhibition, Shin Jang-sik's expression is not the stylized decoration that merely embellishes form but rather a "fitting decoration" more suited to emphasizing the actuality of nature.

From 1989 onward, through woodblock printing, he boldly drew lines across reproduced forms, separating them from the space of representation and forming a temporal sequence — a relation of "deferral" between two moments. With the landscape painted and the lines flung across the surface presented as two distinct moments, the "negation" between them was emphasized, and by negating the previously painted space, the meaning first proposed was freed.

The negation appearing in this expression does not erase the negated space — the first painted space — but presents it intact, so that the post-negation and pre-negation facts coexist, emphasizing their mutually heterogeneous character and independence. Here the negation is not the limiting privatio that seeks to explain the being, but rather a negatio that does not constrain the object but instead frees it. In his work, I have read the act of painting the landscape as the space of affirmation, and the act of subsequently flinging lines across it as the space of negation.

In this exhibition, however, the flung lines have weakened, sometimes even dissolving into the previously painted landscape to become one body with it. At times they produce an image as though one were viewing the subject through a kind of filter; at other times the softly, weakly sprinkled lines stage a space of recollection. In other words, they propose a space that is not the present, not the here, not "this" but "there," not "now" but "that time." The space of memory, the space of recollection, the heart that paints what cannot be visited — through such expression the meaning of his "flung lines" has shifted.

Whether his work will hereafter develop further along the line of "negation," whether it will emphasize the heterogeneity between the two layers, or whether — as in this exhibition — it will move toward complementary lines between them, cannot yet be known. But the meaning of the line will surely change once more, and we expect it.