Magazine Covers Featuring Shin Jang-sik's Works (1991-1993)
A compilation of five magazine covers from June 1991 through June 1993 that featured Shin Jang-sik's paintings — Wolgan Misool (Monthly Art), Cho Heung News (Cho Heung Bank), Hyundai Department Store, Kumho Culture Monthly, and Book & Life. The span of media types (art journal, bank newsletter, department-store magazine, corporate cultural review, general-readership monthly) illustrates the breadth of the artist's reception across Korean publishing in the early 1990s. The use of 〈Where Do Our Hearts Go?〉 (1992) and 〈Vitality〉 (1992) is identified on the covers.
Related materials for this work
- Text Review 1992-05-12 · 서성록
"The Virtues of Tradition and Historicity" — Seo Sung-rok review (1992)
What Shin Jang-sik shows in his work is the preciousness of what is our own. Although he has held several exhibitions, most of them have been devoted to finding our own face. In his second solo exhibition in 1989 (Toh Gallery), he experimented with traditional patterns and various images that might be called Korean; in his sixth solo exhibition in 1991 (Shinsegae Gallery), he developed traditional patterns in contemporary ways while mining the emotions embedded within those patterns.
This exhibition is clearly an extension of that flow. The theme of the work, no exaggeration, is to remind us how valuable and how noble what is ours truly is. In an era of such rapid and unpredictable change, his work may seem out of step with the times — yet, in pointing out what contemporary art tends to overlook and in striving to address the fundamental questions of Korean art, it is profoundly suggestive.
But what are the formal mechanisms the artist summons to visually examine this grand and essential matter — the inheritance and development of tradition? He finds and draws upon those mechanisms from very ordinary places. The images he introduces are mostly linked to folk beliefs or daily customs. There are folk images such as the rainbow-striped jacket worn by a child at their first birthday, brightly colored cheongsa-choreong lanterns, the flame patterns of a Buddha's halo, candles and wood spirits — symbols of prayer for good fortune — alongside natural and crafted images such as cockscombs, ceremonial gongs, window patterns, and winter trees.
These images, without needing arcane terms to explain, are clearly chosen to express what is uniquely ours. Permeating these attempts is his particular interest in tradition — that goes without saying. But however precious the tradition, without the artist's distinctive 'interpretation,' it would not move the viewer. It risks ending in nothing more than rhetoric and obligation; for this reason, we must look closely at how he approaches the question of 'interpreting' traditional images.
He begins with thoroughness in his interpretation of tradition. Rather than presenting form or idea in isolation through non-empirical methods, he displays a meticulous, precise relating of every element to the theme from the very start of his process. Watching the artist work: he first dissolves hanji-paper pulp in water, then attaches the liquefied paper along the contours of a pre-drawn underdrawing or fixes only the necessary portions to build up texture; only after this groundwork is complete does he establish the outline of the form and begin layering the obangsaek (the five colors that symbolize the Korean cosmology). Material, color, and form are all organically bound to the theme. At times he incorporates objects such as old coins, writing implements, and thread, or attaches mosquito coils. These should be understood not in terms of formal concepts like 'substitution' or 'materiality' but in connection with custom (a child reaches at their first birthday for a coin and becomes a merchant, for a writing brush and becomes a scholar) and with the embodiment of unseen qi (the mosquito coil giving form to invisible vital breath). The objects themselves are repurposed as indicators of an Eastern way of life and cosmology.
One thing that distinguishes him from artists who hang 'Koreanness' on their banner — whether directly or indirectly — is the very concrete and analytical nature of his approach. He summons various patterns to reduce ambiguity and raise clarity; this can sometimes make the work tend toward the enumerative and explanatory, but it also reinforces the transmission of his thematic intent. The warm tactility of hanji and the brilliance of the patterns work in proper harmony to amplify the thematic effect. A historicized development of this thematic consciousness is the large-scale work depicting Gwanghwamun — significant for its scale, and also offering material by which we can measure his recent concerns. That 'concern' is, beyond any doubt, the matter of 'the lost national fortune.' The edge of the former Government-General building (now used as the National Museum) hangs over the magnificent upper section of Gwanghwamun, and through it Shin presents, as a kind of commentary, the regret of an unhappy colonial era — a clearing of Japanese remnants that we still only proclaim but fail to enact. The artist's intent — that to recover what is truly ours, the residues of Japanese rule must be excised — is clearly reflected in the work.
To place such emphasis on the virtues of tradition and on historicity within the theme, the artist seems to treat the other elements — contingency, spontaneity, imagination, the mysterious — as relatively unimportant. As a result, viewers experience clear signification through his work rather than a richness of emotion. One thing one might wish for him is that, alongside emphasizing this signification, he also pour care into the formal devices that let viewers feel the unrefined, plain, and natural fragrance of what is truly ours — less precise but humble and natural. When we encounter the rich aroma of national sentiment as in the earthen warmth of nameless potters' unaffected vessels, the thematic dimension of his work will become far more effective. In short, the theme needs to pass through a folkloric filter of form — and this is the task I would leave him with for his future work.
- Text Review 2014-06-18 · 신장식; 최태만
〈To the Other Shore〉 — Artist Note and Choi Tae-man Review (2014)
저 언덕은 "아리랑 고개"일수도 있고, "금강산"일수도 있고, "수행의 완성, 최상, 최고에 이르는 삼매"일수도 있다. "pāramitā 波羅蜜"에 대한 나의 해석과 행(行)일수도 있다.
이 언덕에서 저 언덕으로 ......
고통의 이 세상에서 고통이 없는 저 피안의 세계로, 현실의 차안(此岸)에서 이상의 피안(彼岸)으로 향하는 "희망의 아리랑"이다.
— 신장식
언젠가 신장식은 자신에 대해 "내 인생에 50대는 길 위의 수행자다."라고 말한 바 있다. 나로서는 그가 종교적 발심으로 스스로를 수행자로 규정한 것은 아니라고 생각한다. 그것은 그가 "예술가의 길도 수행자의 길이며, 그림도 수행의 도구라는 생각이 든다. 무엇을 찾으러 세상을 그렇게 다니고 동서고금을 헤맸나? 조금의 빛이라도 표현해낸다면 좋겠다. 나는 그림으로 '희망의 아리랑'을 노래하고 싶다."라고 했던 말을 통해서도 확인할 수 있다. 그가 말한 수행자는 '길을 찾는 사람'의 다른 표현일 것이다.
스스로 길 위의 수행자가 되기를 원했던 것처럼 신장식은 여행을 좋아한다. 그에게 있어 여행은 단지 일상의 굴레로부터 벗어나 재충전을 위한 휴지(休止)의 시간이거나 열심히 일한 자신에게 제공하는 보상(報償)이 아니다. 그는 무언가를 찾는 사람이고, 그 대상이 떠오르면 계속 몰입하기 위해 길을 떠난다.
금강산여행이 열리기 전 금강산을 그릴 때도 그랬다. 금강산과 관련된 많은 자료를 모으고, 조사, 연구하며 그것을 화면 위에 재구성했다. 이러한 열정은 금강산 개방 후 수많은 현지답사를 통해 그를 '금강산화가'로 만드는 동력이기도 했다.
열정이 과도하면 집착이 될 수 있지만 불상을 그리는 것도 어떤 원력(願力)이 작용했기 때문일 것이다. 그것이 무엇일까. 그는 신앙심에 이끌려 예배의 대상인 불상을 그리고 있지는 않다. 어쩌면 불상 자체가 아니라 그것에 깃들어있는 깊은 사유의 정체가 무엇인지 알기 위해 불상을 방편으로 삼았는지 모른다.
아리랑으로부터 금강산, 그리고 불상에 이르기까지 신장식의 그림 속에서 갈등과 대립은 없다. 그 스스로 말했던 것처럼 그가 찾는 것은 '희망의 아리랑'이다. 예술이란 그런 것이 아닐까. 분명하게 단언할 수 없지만 어렴풋하게 떠오르는 빛과 같은 것을 찾아가는 것.
— 최태만 / 미술평론가
- Text News 2014-06-25 · Beopbo News
Beopbo News Coverage — Shin Jang-sik Solo Exhibition "To That Shore"
Beopbo News (June 25, 2014, issue 1250) coverage of Shin Jang-sik's solo exhibition "To That Shore" (June 25–29, 2014, Noam Gallery, Insadong, Seoul). The exhibition is themed on the artist's "interpretation and practice of pāramitā" — the artist explains that "To That Shore" derives from "crossing over to the shore of enlightenment," and offers his own readings of the Arirang Pass, Mt. Geumgang, and Samadhi. Art critic Choi Tae-man analyzes the artist's Buddhist imagery — "Perhaps it is not the Buddha statue itself, but a means to understand the deep contemplative essence dwelling within it."
Coverage (1)
- Beopbo News 2014-06-25
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