Mt. Geumgang

Mt. Geumgang-1

1993 · 546×227 cm · Paper, Acrylic on Canvas

Keywords #Mt. Geumgang#Jingyeongsansu

Image size 5.6 MB

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Text Review 1993-04-30 · Chung Young-mok

"Shin Jang-sik's Formal Method Concerning 'What Is Ours'" — Chung Young-mok review (1993)

Through several recent solo exhibitions, the unusual depth of Shin Jang-sik's attachment to "what is our own" has by now been openly stated. Even before any discussion of its formal accomplishment, the questions surrounding the artist—represented by the 〈Arirang〉 series—of "tradition and iconography" (Park Shin-ui, Choi Tae-man, Kim Young-jae), "Koreanness" (Seo Sung-rok), and "decorativeness" (Oh Byeong-uk) have been considered chiefly from the side of subject matter. Where the artist's intent is so directed, this orientation of interpretation is naturally to be expected. Moreover, the formal vision Shin embraces, which resonated with the fervor of "finding our own" around the time of the Olympics, has been positively received by many.
Over the past several years, alongside the formal possibilities for a historical consciousness in the artist's work—especially in painting that includes the woodblock—critics have offered the following warm-eyed hopes for him. To begin with, Park Shin-ui, on the works in Shin's 1989 solo exhibition (To Gallery), noted that "the depth of symbolism is still shallow … the angle of interpretation upon the iconography is also not yet comprehensive." Choi Tae-man pointed out that his work "carries too strong a diagrammatic aspect" and raised the question of how much persuasive power such iconography could possess "within this modern social life of an industrial society." Kim Young-jae, reading the iconography of the same exhibition from the standpoint of language, gave a positive future-oriented appraisal: how far can the artist "shed everyday language" for a "meta-language or trans-language" as visual language—how effectively can he "express a world-language that is Korean"?
On the works of last year's solo exhibition (Gallery Icon), Kang Sung-won found that the character of the artist's painting, including its iconography, "did not seem to depart greatly from the aesthetic dimension of an institutionalized traditionalism" and expressed hope that the artist would prioritize "the work of uncovering the true face" of traditionality and Koreanness, which has been refracted and occluded in many ways through the 1970s–80s. Finally, Seo Sung-rok stressed the necessity of a "more rugged, plain, simple, and naturally redolent formal apparatus" and of "a process of passing the subject through the filter of more genuinely folk forms."
It is hardly the case that all of these essays correctly diagnosed the artist's problem, nor—even if they had—could they be the decisive elements forecasting or directing his future. To begin with, the abstractness of language is such that these critical texts can come across to the artist as too thinly concrete to translate into practice. With the exception of Kim Young-jae's linguistic vantage, most of the essays emphasized Koreanness and folk character through the iconography of the subject and the depth of its symbolism, leaving the impression that resolving these would carry the artist to his own formal advancement.
Yet on the formal plane, I place my hope in Shin Jang-sik's plastic consciousness through the converse claim—that, in order to keep alive a genuine subject-consciousness of traditionality and Koreanness, the artist must in fact boldly cast off "what is his own" and "what is our own." That is to say, his consciousness of folk character and Koreanness, as it has appeared, should have been more deeply hidden formally; it should have been kept in an extremely ambiguous form of objectivity within still more entangled, doubled and tripled symbolism.
Such works are, of course, to be found among his earlier pieces. For instance, 〈Arirang — Morning〉 of 1988 (fig. 1) lays out the front and side forms of the janggu drum in iconographic fashion, lining them up in a single row on the plane. From a certain angle this conveys a purely formal feeling like that of Jasper Johns's American flags—an iconographic form rid of cultural subject-consciousness, taken purely as an objective object. Likewise, the mosquito coil used as a plastic substitute for 〈Arirang〉 between 1991 and 1992 (fig. 2)—an object that condenses the artist's distinctive wit and decorative sense—shares the same conception. The visual form of "Arirang" with its subject-consciousness lifted out, paired with the sound of the word, somehow feels as though it should be curling and coiled; by substituting an industrial product utterly unrelated to the idea of "Arirang" with that image, the artist achieved an effect of neutralizing his own subjective subject-consciousness and plastic consciousness.
Apart from a few such cases, his subject-consciousness was, in the past, perhaps too strongly exposed. Compared with that, this solo exhibition at Gallery Icon shows that the artist's objectivity—his way of approaching the subject and the form that holds it—has grown, and one can feel that the artist's intellectual seriousness in exploring subject and material has matured.
Shin Jang-sik's interest in "what is our own," which began with the expression of folk paraphernalia (1988–90), has gradually moved toward a Koreanness as historical consciousness embodied in large, artificial structures (architectural forms) during 1991–92. Yet these structures inevitably exist in close relation with the surrounding nature, and the artist must have felt the urge to express nature itself in its bare-being. This appearance of nature usually takes the form of landscape, and the Eastern sansuhwa—the mountain-water painting—occupies a place quite distinct from the Western landscape in spiritual terms. The artist's turn, with 〈Mt. Geumgang〉 as its central subject in this solo exhibition, can be seen as a desire "to put into painting not the heavy, artificial, animal energy of structures, but some energy that approaches quietly, that is still and plant-like—yet within itself tense and full of vitality."
I do not regard this shift in subject-consciousness—toward primarily plant-like images, including 〈Mt. Geumgang〉—as a result of a merely outward change of subject. While his formal vocabulary has not changed in stylistic terms, at least the artist's visual consciousness—the gaze that beholds "Koreanness," "tradition," or "folk character"—has matured and expanded to the point of distinguishing between the plant-like and the animal-like; this is, perhaps, an almost unconscious testimony that the room for the artist's objectivity toward any object of observation has correspondingly grown.
This is also clearly visible in the motivation by which the artist resolved to paint 〈Mt. Geumgang〉. The feeling he received from seeing 〈The Painting of Mt. Geumgang〉 (fig. 3) by Gyeomjae Jeong Seon, in the collection of Korea University Museum and shown last year at the National Museum, along with Jeong's other "plant-like images," was, he says, scarcely different from what he had felt on seeing and folk paraphernalia. In other words, before the questions of subject or content, or the "Koreanness" and "traditionality" laid upon them, Jeong's sansuhwa came to him as a question of form and structure. Beyond the platitude that, hemmed within ideological bounds, one cannot even see—let alone paint—that famous landscape ("there is no Mt. Geumgang before a full stomach"), I believe the decisive motivation lay in the artist's visual independence and objectivity, which allowed him to observe Jeong Seon's sansuhwa from the standpoint of form and structure.
As though uncovering historical fact, Shin Jang-sik gathers and compares visual materials of 〈Mt. Geumgang〉 from past and present that will be inscribed in his own mind, and gains the confidence to draw out a form of his own. Drawing, for instance, on the 〈Mt. Geumgang Photograph Album〉 from the colonial period (fig. 4) or the 〈Mt. Geumgang〉 footage filmed and broadcast on television by a women's delegation that visited the North last year (fig. 5), he excludes all narrative subject matter and seeks—much as in Jeong Seon's work—to present a structural form of mountain divided into countless facets and, through the artist's signature dripping technique that neutralizes the manifestness of that form, to bring forth a mountain of an auspicious feeling transcending eras.
On the formal plane, where the previous works took frontality and symmetry as their structural skeleton, with decorative and iconographic elements emerging too prominently, these "plant-like images" markedly relax such elements. In the past, the structural frontality reinforced a certain austerity, and the symmetry added a tension to the picture plane, all consistent with the artist's subject-consciousness; but since the artist's subject-consciousness has shifted toward expressing in plastic form a plant-like energy that grows tough, that quietly holds an invisible inner strength, the elements that propped up iconography must in turn recede.
In the end, where the narrative approach to subject was once a considerable burden, by pursuing the pure conceptuality of matter—and so working out the question of pure visual form as the question of conception itself—the artist will, I believe, come to encounter a new plastic vocabulary capable of bearing his transformed subject-consciousness.

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Text Review 1995-02-21 · Park Eun-soon

Shin Jang-sik's Paintings of Mt. Geumgang — Park Eun-soon review (1995)

Shin Jang-sik is a painter who searches in earnest. He ceaselessly pursues, and seeks answers to, the meaning of artistic work, distinctive techniques of expression, the conditions of our life in this age, and the question of self-identity. The fact that he has taken as his subjects the simple wildflowers and (blue-and-red silk lanterns), the great drum, and Gwanghwamun — objects formed in history and still present in the now — was not simply a riding of the wave of subject-fashion or a superficial extraction of tradition. In expressing such subjects, he sought to express together the formal sense and sensibility that have, after long experimentation within our history, life, and art, become embodied in our constitution. And further, in order to find new values in our culture and life, he pursued the meaning and role of artistic expression, and the aesthetics and styles that might appeal to the sensibility of the contemporary person.
In this exhibition, Shin Jang-sik paints . What distinguishes Mt. Geumgang from or Mt. Hallasan — these mountains within reach — is that it lies beyond the Demilitarized Zone in the north, unreachable; and at the same time, for over a thousand years from the Goryeo period to the modern age, it has been the source of inspiration that gave birth to varied faiths and thought, literature and visual art. Mt. Geumgang has been considered, at times, a Buddhist holy ground — to see it once meant one would not fall into the realms of evil after death — at other times the exalted landscape of the Confucian scholar who would cultivate his temperament with that of the wise and benevolent, and again the longed-for immortal realm: he who has not seen Mt. Geumgang once in his lifetime cannot count himself among men. To us who now live in an age of division, Mt. Geumgang has come to carry yet another meaning — an emblem standing for the unification of the nation and the vision of a new future. Yet from some point on, young artists who could not reach Mt. Geumgang no longer painted it; and that, in itself, is the bare voice of a long culture and tradition severed — of our nation's contorted history.
An auspicious mountain etched deep in the heart of the entire nation — . What, then, is the reason and meaning of painting a Mt. Geumgang one has never visited? Especially now that Mt. Geumgang is no longer an object that can be treated as a mere landscape, to discover Mt. Geumgang and take it as a subject of artistic expression is by no means a thing one can do casually or by chance. Such a venture requires a deep-rooted attachment to and reflection upon our history and culture, a fierce examination of the real conditions of life, and a clear vision of the future; it requires a serious inquiry into the essence and the role of art; and naturally, the eminent sensibility and expressive capacity to sublimate such conditions into artistic expression.
Through long years of ruminating on our culture and art in his practice, Shin Jang-sik at last came to discover . To paint it, he studied the geology and forms of the mountain by composing the colonial-period photograph albums of Mt. Geumgang together with recently filmed videos of the mountain. He also examined the Mt. Geumgang paintings of various Joseon masters, beginning with Jeong Seon, studying the features and techniques of their expression. He has highlighted in particular the dynamic forms and the emissions of qi from the rocky peaks of Manmulcho (Outer Geumgang), soaring as if pushing into the sky, and at times has emphasized the spiritual power and mystery of a Mt. Geumgang the artist himself has not visited — a mountain that has by now become almost legendary. Painted in dominant blues and deep cobalts, the heavy, solid form of Mt. Geumgang seems on the one hand to take root firmly in the earth, unshaken by any storm, and on the other to possess a vigorous form and animation soaring toward the sky. If such scenes epically represent our nation's spirited bearing and tenacious vitality, the other Mt. Geumgang paintings — gentler, almost undulating peaks rendered flatly, with white richly applied to emphasize a mythic atmosphere — lyrically express the longing and affection for a Mt. Geumgang that is always longed for in the heart yet, for now, cannot be visited.
Were the work of Shin Jang-sik to draw only from the character and features of Mt. Geumgang as a subject, our curiosity about his work would be halved. But by skillfully fusing content, form, and technique, he maximizes the artist's intent and formal achievement, opening new horizons in his painting. The forms, colors, and various techniques he chooses combine very intimately to yield a singular expressive force. The blues, deep cobalt, and white used as the dominant palette to symbolize the atmosphere and meaning of Mt. Geumgang reinforce the symbolic atmosphere; the deft arrangement of form and color emphasizing an ascending current; the distinctive texture and vitality of expression rising from the dak (mulberry) paper pre-applied to canvas; and the finishing with sprinkled acrylic paints of various colors — producing the feeling of inner energy or qi bursting forth as it once did under the brushstrokes of old ink paintings — these are all of a piece. Likewise, the squares of deep-blue horizontal and vertical lines that sometimes cover the entire surface are at once an expression suggesting that one looks upon the Mt. Geumgang of one's dreams through an inner window, or that compensates for the lack of confidence in an actually surveyed landscape one could not yet directly observe and paint; a metaphor for the present situation, and at the same time a means of showing a more layered formal richness. The bolts and nuts atop the knots of the squares seem at once symbols of yin and yang, supports for the tenacious topography and force of Mt. Geumgang, and a contemporary reading of the constellations.
Thus, mobilizing new themes and subjects and varied techniques of expression, Shin Jang-sik has revealed a new formal accomplishment — more substantial than before, more topical, more tightly fusing form, content, and technique. Watching the many shifts and the tenacious artistic will manifest in this exhibition, we direct our gaze toward him once again.

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Text Review 2015-03-03 · Shin Dong-in

Beyond Longing, Hand In Hand (2015)

The 1988 Olympics in Seoul, Republic of Korea, were enough to astonish the people of the world. Of a Korea that had endured the harsh Japanese colonial seizure of the early twentieth century and that, with the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, had been split into South and North and reduced to utter ruin, the foreign correspondents of the time called it "a country with no tomorrow." That Korea staged the 1988 Olympics successfully alongside dazzling economic growth. The message Koreans sent to the world, after overcoming their tragic modern history, appears in the theme song of the Seoul Olympics, "Hand In Hand." Beyond the ceaseless ideological strife in the world and the East–West confrontation, it expressed the longing for "peace," to go forward together. In spite of such yearning, in 2015 the Republic of Korea still confronts the North across the line, gun barrels facing one another. North Korea's armed provocations against the world remain ongoing as if scarcely new. Worse, the sheer misery of the lives of the North Korean people — where the dignity of the human has wholly collapsed and they suffer hunger and poverty — sounds a historical alarm to us who live in the "modern" age called the twenty-first century. As in the Seoul Olympics theme song, we would like to take hand in hand, but a historical boundary keeps us from meeting — a long triple wire fence running across the middle of the Korean peninsula from west to east. At its end, beyond the armistice line, sits "Mt. Geumgang," famous for breathtaking scenery and revered as a historical landmark, today a symbol of the yearning for "peaceful unification."
Shin Jang-sik is well known in Korea as the "Mt. Geumgang" painter. For twenty-two years, from 1993 to the present, he has been absorbed in the subject of "Mt. Geumgang." Before turning to his journey toward "Mt. Geumgang" and the survey of his artistic world, there is a part of his record we cannot leave out: he served as assistant art director for the opening and closing ceremonies of the 1988 Seoul Olympics. For him, the experience of the "Olympics" became a great landmark in forming his subsequent body of work. The core question that runs through his work is precisely "What are Korean values?" This is not a discourse circling only within a single nation but a concern shaped by the historical question of an "encounter with the world." Today there are many words and varied images about Korea shared with the people of the world — K-POP, Samsung — yet the problem-consciousness placed before the young painter Shin Jang-sik in 1988 was, compared with today, more fundamental. It was a search not for a packaging of the so-called "Miracle on the Han" — astonishing economic development — but for the embodiment of the culture and spirit, the historical identity carried within it. To stand confidently before the world for the first time through the Olympics, Koreans shed blood, sweat, and tears; the longing to share these as the universal global values of "affirmation" and "hope" while embedding within them a Korean aesthetic consciousness — this was the "zeitgeist" he felt deeply through the Seoul Olympics. The first overseas exhibition of the painter Shin Jang-sik, "Arirang," in Berlin in 1989, was precisely the fruit of that. His interest then turned toward a broader historical recognition, and that direction was "Mt. Geumgang."
Since the division of the South and the North, was, for Koreans, a mystical and longed-for object — within sight, yet beyond reach. With the start of Mt. Geumgang tourism between the two Koreas on November 18, 1998, Koreans could for the first time in half a century see Mt. Geumgang with their own eyes. Mt. Geumgang then took its place as a site symbolizing the seeds of South-North exchange and reconciliation, peace and unification; even reunions of separated families were held there. The painter Shin Jang-sik's Mt. Geumgang painting too can be seen to have changed in expression around 1998. Until he saw the actual Mt. Geumgang in person, the Mt. Geumgang he painted for some five years can be called "gwannyeom sansuhwa (conceptual landscape painting, 관념 산수화)." Unreachable, it was for him not a sensuous object but an imagined space — a conceptual object that might appear in legend. Mt. Geumgang was a landscape that existed clearly and nearby, yet, blocked by historical barriers, could only exist in imagination — a place to be sought only in forgotten documents and in paintings left by our ancestors. The traditional subject-matter and decorativeness characteristic of his works in the early 1990s, transposed through the ideational medium of "Mt. Geumgang" and through the traditional East Asian form of sansuhwa (Korean landscape painting), became more structured. He could therefore build a formal world not through a descriptive method reflecting ordinary landscape but in a more spiritual, ideational form. Many critics who surveyed his body of work tried to explain it through the bipartite frame of harmony of form and content, theme and expression. Such criticisms, however, can be seen as merely internal debates within the small category called "art." Rather than understanding Shin Jang-sik's body of work nationally, or by the internal principles of art, what matters is to bring forth the historical implications that could only hide beneath the cloak of "formal vocabulary." The core question, accordingly, must be more challenging: "What does Mt. Geumgang mean to the people of the world?"
The tragic war, the Korean War, and the South-North division that took place on the Korean peninsula at the edge of Northeast Asia is by no means only the domestic history of the Republic of Korea. In the mid-twentieth century, the center of global confrontation and conflict — the battlefield of ideology and the Cold War — was precisely the darkened Korean peninsula. The U.S. political scientist Zbigniew Brzezinski's concept of "geopolitics" well shows the context in which the history of the Korean peninsula could only flow as it did. Brzezinski described the Korean peninsula as a "pivot." A "geopolitical pivot" is a globally contested zone arising from the collision of maritime and continental powers. The "Balkans" can be cited as an example. Against the historical whirlwinds that sweep over such regions, the lives of individuals can only arrive as fate. Despite such fated and severe historical trials, Koreans have made painstaking efforts to overcome them. The astonishing economic growth of the Republic of Korea, and the urgent longing for the unification of the Korean peninsula, can be called the urgent yearning for "peace" that does not lose hope even amid ruin. Accordingly, the step toward overcoming division and toward a unified Korea stands on the historical road that realizes the universal values of humanity.
Until 1998, the painted by Shin Jang-sik abstractly and paradoxically revealed the historical idea — invisible in form — of "Cold War" and "ideology" that justified the South-North division. Yet the Mt. Geumgang he painted is by no means a painting bound only to "idea" — confined to an imagined frame. Across a solemn, energy-filled blue canvas, his signature dripping technique reveals a living vitality. Although it is an imagined landscape, a landscape shaped by formal vocabulary, the artist's expressive will, his will to freedom filled with energy, is ardently revealed on the canvas. After the first Mt. Geumgang tours began in 1998, the wonder he felt on seeing the site in person can scarcely be imagined. Only after witnessing with his own eyes the long-longed-for landscape he had patiently held within himself could his Mt. Geumgang undergo a new transformation. It became the occasion for being born again from "gwannyeom sansuhwa (conceptual landscape painting)" into "jingyeong sansuhwa (true-view landscape painting, 실경 산수화)." Compared to his earlier abstract expression, the more concrete depiction of the mountain forms and the harmony of increasingly varied colors strengthened the lyricism of landscape and expressed a more hopeful, future-oriented, positive energy. Even so, his thirst, manifested through Mt. Geumgang, cannot be said to have been fully quenched. Constrained by the nature of tourism, he could see only restricted places; and above all, the core — the historical reality of "the division of the Korean peninsula" — had not changed at all. In 2008, after the incident of a tourist being shot dead, Mt. Geumgang tourism has been suspended to this day. His body of work seemed once again to sink back into waiting.
Some may ask: can "culture" and "art" truly change the world? Those critical of the idea insist that behind religion, culture, art, and further behind humanity's spiritual activities lies "economic logic." Many materialist scholars have indeed established this. Coldly seen, this is hard to deny. Even so, the reason culture and art continue to play an important role is in producing the force of "recognition." Such "recognitions" gather and form "justifications," draw out "practice," and open new worlds. In September 2013, the daughter of a high-ranking figure in North Korea secretly defected while studying in China and entered the South. The decisive motive for her defection was nothing other than her admiration for Korean culture as reflected in the media. What is another historical subject through which the force of "recognition" opens a better world? Precisely the question of "human rights." From U.S. President Lincoln, respected in America, to Dr. Martin Luther King, the struggle for the dignity by which humans may live as humans was never an easy road. The historical flow is, like an unseen underground current that gathers to form vast rivers and then a sea, a flow that demands long patience. Even if, against the history of humanity, our lives of less than a hundred years are short struggles, history is also the truth that endlessly continues. The lives of the people of North Korea, revealed in UN human rights reports — that actuality is unspeakably grave. Yet movements to address this and to look toward a better world are gradually becoming more visible. From precisely such a flow and view, "culture" and "art" — though they require long patience and historical struggle — can become a clear medium through which the world can be changed.
In 2015, the exhibition of the painter Shin Jang-sik in New York, which one can call the center of the world, will become a crucial turning point in measuring the body of work he will go on to open. If he first faced the world through the 1988 Olympics and began his concern with "Korean values," and if he has, through the theme of "Mt. Geumgang," repeatedly elaborated cultural and historical recognition and concern, the question of what comes next cannot but be asked. Is "Mt. Geumgang" still meaningful? What meaning can "Mt. Geumgang" carry to the people of the world? It is precisely the question of the future. To consider such a call positively and with courage may begin where the artist's own perception of the world expands. What is the greater recognition, the historical implication and justification, that remains for him? From the question "What are Korean values?" given to the young painter in 1988, what is the historical question now placed before the painter Shin Jang-sik in his middle years? Nothing other than "What are the values of a unified Korea?" Ironically, the wheel of history is a fate that repeats, whether small or great. This is precisely the moment one cannot but recall the Olympic theme song "Hand In Hand," which must have struck his heart twenty-seven years before.

1988 Seoul Olympics anthem 〈Hand In Hand〉 — referenced in the essay

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Mixed Lecture 2011-05-25 · Shin Jang-sik

Okinawa International University Symposium — 'Mt. Geumgang Paintings' (Shin Jang-sik) (2011)

Geumgang stands there as space, yet it abides with the twenty years of time in which it met me. Through 365 days, through twelve months, Geumgang was together with my time. And it dwells, too, within the paintings in which I tried to hold its beauty. The Twelve Scenes of (金剛十二景) are a small fruit born within this time and space. Time shared with me — and so, twelve scenes.
Spring, summer, autumn, winter — the twelve meetings of earth and moon changed 's beauty, and I longed to paint what they held. The memory of sharing that changing time by the measure of the moon, and the beauty of the space-time meeting Geumgang in the days to come — may it meet my paintings once more.
[[center]]Paintings of
[[right]]Shin Jang-sik (Professor, Kookmin University; Painter)
1. The Tradition of Painting
Paintings of are countless — from the Goryeo monk No-yeong's Buddhist 〈Painting of Kṣitigarbha〉, to Gyeomjae Jeong Seon's 〈Geumgang Jeondo〉, the album leaves of Kim Hong-do, the many , and modern works such as Haegang Kim Gyu-jin's 〈Mt. Geumgang〉 and 〈Chongseokjeong〉 (painted after a sketching journey by order of Emperor Sunjong during the colonial period) and Sojeong Byeon Gwan-sik's 〈Samseonam〉. Mt. Geumgang painting, in particular, is a sanctuary in the history of our painting — the place where, from Gyeomjae Jeong Seon onward, our own aesthetics were established by sketching the beauty of our land from the actual scene (silgyeong). The inspiration for our painting in our age, made from our own, must surely be sought here.
2. Division and
And yet since the division, not a single painter in the South has painted . Even from imagination and materials, would it not be good to attempt Mt. Geumgang painting anew at this moment? With this thought I began, and from my 1993 solo exhibition through 1998 I have presented five solo exhibitions on the theme of Mt. Geumgang. In truth, my experience as assistant art director for the opening and closing ceremonies of the 1988 Seoul Olympics gave the initial momentum: from interest in the formal vocabulary hidden in folk subjects — , drums, gongs, flags, Gyeongbokgung — I worked under the theme of "Arirang." Afterward, expressing the animation and vitality dwelling in our land through subjects such as cockscomb, wild grasses, the pine, and Bukhansan, I came naturally to think: if so, why not paint Mt. Geumgang, the sanctuary of our painting? That simple thought was the beginning of my Mt. Geumgang painting. Considered in the pictorial context of Mt. Geumgang as well as in its cultural-political weight, the "Mt. Geumgang" rendered by a painter of this age, who confronts the unrelenting reality of division, is yet another story of unification.
3. Found Again
Now, having met several times, perhaps that animation and shinmyeong (exalted spirit) will seep into my paintings as well. There remain many places I have not directly seen — Chongseokjeong, Singeumgang, and so on — but perhaps the shinmyeong and vitality our people carry are now possible within Mt. Geumgang paintings. Will a time not come, in the future, when the division of our nation is overcome and Mt. Geumgang is reborn as a symbol of the nation? Then I shall see it to my heart's content. I hope, too, that some measure of this shinmyeong and vitality will be expressed in my paintings.
4. Ideational Paintings
1993–1998 — Painting without having visited carried no small number of regrets. Yet I could not erase from those paintings the hope that one day I might go. This work, begun long ago, was accompanied by research on Mt. Geumgang painting as a pictorial value. The works of that time, of which one could without exaggeration say they were ideational sansu (the East Asian landscape painting tradition), were thin in the connection between actuality and form, and drew doubtful looks from those around. My efforts to overcome this point appeared as research into old Mt. Geumgang paintings and the gathering of photographic materials, but a landscape painted without on-site experience was inevitably, perhaps, a painting in the head rather than in the heart. The black-and-white photograph from my 1996 solo exhibition catalog — me looking off into the distance with a cigarette — quietly shows my position standing at the clear fork between ideational sansu and true-view sansu (). A painter standing before the wire fence of the armistice line carries the air of one who longs for, or foresees, crossing it soon for Mt. Geumgang.
5. Realistic Paintings
I approached as a symbol and have now met its actuality. To paint the mountain yet to surpass the order of so-called representational sansu — that of merely transcribing the mountain — may be my principal task. Yet I have sought to step out of that frame, toward reading the actuality of Mt. Geumgang. The Mt. Geumgang paintings after my visits to the mountain differ in many ways from those before. First, ideational sansu can now turn into jingyeong sansu (). My recent works are jingyeong works of Mt. Geumgang, made on the basis of materials gathered by my own sketches and photographs on site. What I mean here by "the turn from ideation to true-view" is the process of finding "the union of actual landscape and painting." To speak — through Mt. Geumgang — of the animation of nature and the people, and further to take up concretely the contemporary and on-site (the situation including division) — this is the singular possibility that my painting cannot abandon. It is the work of attaining, through the union of symbol and actuality, an authenticity that runs through life and art.
6. Prospects for Painting
is my Mt. Geumgang, and our nation's Mt. Geumgang. I hold this hope: that one day, painters from the South and the North together may paint Mt. Geumgang on its very soil, debate our art, and exhibit in Seoul and Pyongyang — would not our symbol thereby be made still more precious? Would it not be possible to meet through the sensibility common to our people? Not meeting an empty mountain devoid of people, but meeting the mountain together with its people — the joy then would be greater still.

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