Arirang-Hope

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• Text Review 1991-03-19 · Oh Byung-uk

  〈Decorative Painting and the Pursuit of Tradition〉 — Oh Byung-uk review (1991)

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  Text Review 1991-03-19 · Oh Byung-uk

  〈Decorative Painting and the Pursuit of Tradition〉 — Oh Byung-uk review (1991)

  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 repose 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 cheongsachorong 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.

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• Text Interview 2008-09 · Artist's Blog

  Interview with Shin Jang-sik for the 13th Busan International Film Festival (2008)

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  Text Interview 2008-09 · Artist's Blog

  Interview with Shin Jang-sik for the 13th Busan International Film Festival (2008)

  Q. The Busan International Film Festival has reached its 13th edition. This year, your work has been selected as the source painting for the festival's official poster, marking your involvement with the festival's history. Which aspect of 〈Arirang — Hope I〉 do you think aligned with the character of the Busan International Film Festival?

  A. I shall replace my reply with the festival's official statement.

  — The official poster of the 13th Busan International Film Festival is a design by BIFF Art Director Choi Soon-dae, based on the source painting "Arirang — Hope I" from the 〈Arirang〉 series by the Western-style painter Shin Jang-sik, who reinterprets our traditional culture and is absorbed in reproducing the bright, vital, life-rich aspects our culture carries. "Arirang — Hope I," expressing our exquisite and animated saekdong (rainbow-striped) culture, is a painting that aligns well with the character of the Busan International Film Festival, which is regarded as one of the most passionate film festivals in the world. This year's official poster, based on it, also well reveals the identity and direction of the BIFF, which dreams of a bright future grounded in the joy and tradition of a festival. — BIFF Official Statement

  Q. Please tell us also what you sought to embed in the work.

  A. "Arirang — Hope I" is one of the works in the Arirang series. Arirang is the representative folk song of our people, and thus a song that speaks for the sensibility of our people. I have been working under the theme of Arirang in order to paint a "song-painting" condensing our sensibility today.

  While the Arirang of the colonial era emphasized han — the sentiment of crossing the Arirang pass (separation, hardship, suffering, etc.) — I emphasize instead the will and hope of crossing the Arirang pass (newness, a new world).

  The lotus has always been around us, growing into beautiful form within muddy darkness — a subject well suited to the concept of Arirang I seek to express (hope, vitality, will).

  Against the dark lotus leaves and the achromatic silver background, the lotus flower is rendered as radiant, vital, and powerful, and the force and energy radiating from it into the world is expressed in obangsaek (the five-direction colors).

  Q. You served as assistant art director for the Seoul Olympic Organizing Committee. You have many connections with international events — perhaps because of your attempt to show our tradition through your work. Through what elements do you express the sensibility of our people as contemporary art?

  A. The Seoul Olympics was an important means and opportunity to show "what is ours" to the world. For me, who had studied contemporary art, it was an important opportunity to take interest in and study what is ours. I felt keenly that the imperative of our contemporary art is realized only through ceaseless research into what is ours and through new expression.

  At first, I took interest in the formal vocabulary hidden within the small and large implements formed in our life and history and pursued new form through them. For example, I studied the forms, proportions, obangsaek, and meanings of cheongsachorong, traditional instruments (drum, gong, do), flags, masks, Gyeongbokgung, the lattice patterns of Singyesa, and made new expressions from them.

  Next, taking interest in the environment around us, I turned to the expression of vitality within nature — wild grasses, flowers, the pine, Dokdo, constellations, and so on.

  Recently, I have taken interest in Mt. Geumgang, which holds these elements in combination, and am absorbed in "Mt. Geumgang paintings."

  What I seek to express through such subjects can be called the "Arirang of hope" sung through painting.

  Q. Have you visited the BIFF before? If you have any memories of it, we would like to hear them. (Films you have seen, or stories of film figures, are also welcome.)

  A. This time I shall participate in person.

  I have a connection with film. About ten of my paintings appear in director Kang Woo-suk's 〈Hanbando〉. The Mt. Geumgang painting above Ahn Sung-ki's bed (he plays the president); the painting between Ahn Sung-ki and Moon Sung-keun in the final scene where they face each other; cheongsachorong paintings and Mt. Geumgang paintings hung throughout the presidential office in the film. I would be happy to see our paintings appear more often in dramas and films.

  Q. This year's BIFF will be especially meaningful for you. Will you visit Busan during the opening ceremony or the festival period? We would like to hear your plans.

  A. As the poster artist, I plan to hold a solo exhibition in Busan during the festival.

  — Shin Jang-sik Solo Exhibition "Arirang — Hope," September 30 (Tue) – October 26 (Sun), 2008, Ches Art Center (Ches Art Building, 1491-7 Jung 2-dong, Haeundae-gu, Busan; Dalmaji-gil)

  Please take an interest in the solo exhibition.

  Q. Looking ahead, what kind of festival do you hope the BIFF will grow into?

  A. A festival representative of Asia. A 21st-century representative festival that realizes the values of Asia in film within the world. I hope the BIFF becomes a true homeland of Hallyu in film.

  Q. We are curious about your current work and upcoming exhibition plans.

  A. I will work around themes such as Arirang, Mt. Geumgang, our formal language, a peaceful world where human and nature are in harmony, how the various expressive languages of Korea might grow into universal world-languages capable of moving others, and twenty-first-century art. Another good opportunity like this will surely come.

  Thank you.

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