Arirang — Resound the Earth, Resound the Sky

Related materials for this work

• Text Review 1992-05-12 · Seo Sung-rok

  "The Virtues of Tradition and Historicity" — Seo Sung-rok review (1992)

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  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 cheongsachorong 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.

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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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