Arirang -Happy Day

Related materials for this work

• Mixed Review 1989-07-01 · Kim Young-jae

  Art Post, "Metalinguistic Possibilities of Arirang" — Kim Young-jae Critique (1989)

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  Mixed Review 1989-07-01 · Kim Young-jae

  Art Post, "Metalinguistic Possibilities of Arirang" — Kim Young-jae Critique (1989)

  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.

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

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