Arirang-Happy Day

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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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• Mixed Review 1994-04 · Seo Jeong-geol

  Monthly Art Magazine, April 1994, "Reinterpreting Tradition, Expressing Life and Rhythm" — Seo Jeong-geol Critique (1994)

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  Mixed Review 1994-04 · Seo Jeong-geol

  Monthly Art Magazine, April 1994, "Reinterpreting Tradition, Expressing Life and Rhythm" — Seo Jeong-geol Critique (1994)

  A recognition of the rhythm intrinsic to materials, and a practice of aligning one's own breath with that rhythm

  Shin Jang-sik's studio lies behind a quiet village on the border between Seoul and Seongnam. The village is thoroughly pastoral — rows of greenhouses growing flowers, low hills, and orchards spread across the landscape. He rents one bay of a slate-roofed building originally built as a factory, using it as his studio; the building, divided into six bays, is wholly leased to painters and forms a kind of collective studio. Besides Shin Jang-sik, Lee Gi-bong, Yoon Hae-nam, Jang Mun-geol, and Lee In-hee settled there early on, and Hong Seung-hye has recently joined. All of them are emerging artists drawing notice in the art world — what one might call rising figures.

  Although secluded from the city center, the place hums with the working energy of young artists. They even harbor an ambitious plan to open their studios soon and lay their work bare for view. As they exchange and cultivate their own worlds together, the place is filled with no ordinary heat — soon, it will be a topic in the art scene.

  An aerie of young artists, it is bound to harbor not only working passion but also a quiet undercurrent of competition. Shin Jang-sik, finishing his lectures at the university, comes straight here to immerse himself in painterly study. Somehow "study" or "inquiry" feels more apt than "work." His studio — the printing press, vessels holding pigments of every color, the print drying rack, the multi-function compressor brought in to make canvases by hand, the bowls of paper pulp — gives the impression of stepping into a laboratory.

  What he has been pursuing is the expression of rhythm. To express rhythm is to breathe life into a painting; when the picture plane brims with rhythm, the resonance a viewer feels before it grows richer. "Everything that lives carries rhythm," he holds, "and my task is to find the point where my own breath aligns with the rhythm of the materials." "At first my conscious intentions were strong, but gradually I came to perceive the rhythm of the materials themselves, and by working upon that recognition, new ideas emerged and the works gained vitality. … How dry and lifeless are works into which no life has been breathed?" In roughly these terms he began to describe his own artistic world. Concepts like vitality, rhythm, and movement form the foundation of his work. By setting aside calculated intention and following the rhythm of himself and his materials, the vitality inherent in nature and his own sensibility emerge of their own accord.

  Such recognition rests on long-standing aesthetic cores of traditional art. The traditional and folk subjects he frequently brings into his works function as conduits for realizing this aesthetic premise. The fact that the word "vitality" so often follows the names of traditional motifs — "Arirang," "cheongsachorong (blue-and-red silk lanterns)," and the like — in his work titles is not unrelated. Recently, his subjects have been moving from folk objects toward nature — proof of how deep and broad his exploration of tradition has grown. Even when he chooses nature as subject, he attends to objects rich in traditional resonance: the pine, the dandelion, the wild chrysanthemum, the cockscomb. The arrangement of the traditional, Korean nuance such subjects carry across the entire picture plane, together with the emphasis on a sense of movement — these are common features of his work. In technique, too, he employs a distinctive method that seems drawn from the conventions of traditional painting such as sansuhwa (mountain-water painting) and hwajohwa (flower-and-bird painting). Through the expression of thick, generous textures and through vivid color contrasts, he reaches toward the qualities of Korean beauty.

  The work of probing the essence of traditional beauty through the discovery of traditional images and sensibilities

  These ideas of his began to take shape around the mid-1980s. He served as assistant art director (under chief director Lee Man-ik, a Western-style painter) for the opening and closing ceremonies of the 1988 Seoul Olympics, in the course of which he collected an extensive body of folk material and was able to study deeply the formal qualities and content of traditional artifacts. The programs 〈The Procession of Drums〉, 〈Chaos〉, and 〈The Departing Boat〉 — which he conceived or participated in — were grounded in neunghaengdo (royal procession painting) and indigenous folk games. The props deployed were drawn from folk materials such as ceremonial flags and cheongsachorong. The waves of countless flags and the procession of blue-and-red lanterns made a profound impression on him. When such individual elements gathered into a totality, the rhythm and vitality radiating from them were etched deeply in his mind, and this became the foundation of his artistic world. "The flicker of light, the rhythm of color, the emotion of seeing them as one totality — this manner of drawing constitutes our native aesthetic and the very essence of our identity," he reflects. "Sensibility itself matters more than style or form, and what matters most is to reveal, with depth, the sensibility we share as a common thread."

  Another decisive moment that deepened his artistic world was his interest in woodblock printing. Producing woodblock prints, he says, he found that the relationship between the form carved into the wood and the wood's inherent qualities — its vitality and rhythm — had a great bearing on the work. "Meeting the wood, carving a form into it, and printing — when this act takes account of a sense of rhythm versus when it does not, the difference is subtle yet essential." In his telling, this finally returns to the question of how to hold within the depicted form not so much the appearance of the subject but rather the sensibility the subject carries together with the artist's own emotion.

  To bring rhythm to the picture plane, he has introduced techniques such as dripping and applying coarse string. The organic combination of forms bounded by winding lines, the thin, sharp lines scattered across the plane, and the powerful contrasts of color clearly convey his intent. The result of working with such principles and conceptions is precisely an inquiry into a new formal vocabulary that holds Korean sensibility intact.

  Monthly Art, April 1994

  

  

  

  

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• Video Feature 2024-10-08 · Myungwon Museum

  'Citizen of Kookmin: Shin Jang-sik' — Curated Special Exhibition Introduction Video (2024)

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  Video Feature 2024-10-08 · Myungwon Museum

  'Citizen of Kookmin: Shin Jang-sik' — Curated Special Exhibition Introduction Video (2024)

  An introductory video for the curated special exhibition 'Citizen of Kookmin: Shin Jang-sik', held at Myungwon Museum of Kookmin University in October 2024. Spanning 11 works including pieces from the museum's collection, the video traces the artist's life and oeuvre chronologically, weaving together images of his works and personal photographs.

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