Where Do Our Hearts Go?
1992 · 130×162 cm · Acrylic on Canvas
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 · Seo Sung-rok
"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 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 -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 (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 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 · Shin Jang-sik; Choi Tae-man
〈To the Other Shore〉 — Artist Note and Choi Tae-man Review (2014)
That yonder shore may be the "Arirang pass," may be "Mt. Geumgang," may be "samādhi — the completion, the highest, the supreme attainment of practice," may be my interpretation and practice (行) of "pāramitā (波羅蜜)."
From this shore to that yonder shore ......
From this world of suffering to that yonder world without suffering, from the actual shore (此岸) of reality to the yonder shore (彼岸) of the ideal — the "Arirang of hope."
— Shin Jang-sik
Once Shin Jang-sik said of himself, "My fifties in life are those of a wayfaring practitioner (a wanderer on the path)." For my part, I do not think he defined himself as a religious practitioner in the strict sense. This can be confirmed in his own words: "I have come to think that the way of the artist is also the way of the practitioner, and that painting too is an instrument of practice. What was I looking for, wandering East and West, past and present? If I can express even a little of that light, that would be good. I want to sing 'the Arirang of hope' in painting." The practitioner he speaks of is, in another phrasing, "one who is searching for a way."
As he wished to be a wayfaring practitioner, Shin Jang-sik loves to travel. For him, travel is not merely a time of pause to escape the chains of daily life and to recharge, nor a reward bestowed upon a hard-working self. He is one who searches for something, and when the object appears, he sets out on the road in order to remain absorbed in it.
It was the same when he painted before tours to it had opened. He collected, surveyed, and studied an abundance of materials related to Mt. Geumgang and reconstructed it on the surface. After the opening of Mt. Geumgang, that same passion, through countless field surveys, was also the driving force that made him "the Mt. Geumgang painter."
Excessive passion can become attachment, but his painting of Buddhist statues must also have been driven by some kind of vow-force (wonryeok). What might it be? He is not, drawn by religious faith, painting the Buddha as an object of worship. Perhaps he has taken Buddhist statues as a "means" not for the statue itself but in order to know the identity of the deep thought that dwells within them.
From to to the Buddhist statues, there is no conflict or opposition in Shin Jang-sik's paintings. What he is searching for, as he himself has said, is "the Arirang of hope." Is not art such a thing? Searching for a light that cannot be declared in clear terms but rises faintly into view.
— Choi Tae-man / art critic
- 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 Pass, , and . 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 · Nam Su-yeon
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