Mt. Geumgang

Mt. Geumgang

1993 · 455×182 cm · Paper, Acrylic on Canvas

Keywords #Mt. Geumgang#Jingyeongsansu

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Exhibitions

1993 〈Mt. Geumgang〉 · Gallery Icon (Solo exhibition)

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Related materials for this work

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 1993-04-30 · Kim Jin-a

Misulbipyeong, Shin Jang-sik 〈Mt. Geumgang〉 — Review by Kim Jin-a (1993)

Under the theme of , the artist Shin Jang-sik has devoted himself to expressing elements of Korean tradition—flags, cheongsacho lanterns, janggu and other drums, and the five cardinal colors (). In this exhibition, however, he moves beyond a representational treatment that merely puts tradition on display: he gives sculptural form to as a spiritual resonance and, through plant life, reveals the overflowing vitality and prayer of Arirang in a more metaphorical way.
Two immense panels of unfold across the gallery. They seem half-wrapped in mist; were it not mist, one would have to peel away a single dazzling layer of sunlight. Then the mountains rise quietly into view. The cliffs split facet upon facet, clad in motley reds, yellows, greens, and blues like a child's rainbow coat. Only then do these finely fractured planes call to mind the painter Jeong Seon. The contour lines have surely absorbed Jeong Seon, yet the whole belongs to the artist's own formal idiom—a process of hammering paper-mulberry pulp by hand to lay the ground, lifting forms and filling them in, then scattering pigment once more across the surface—out of which emerges a Mt. Geumgang newly our own. The mountain forms, exuding a serene atmosphere of Seon (禪, Zen), merge with a contemporary pictorial language, at once Korean and refusing to be merely Korean. Yet there, unmistakably, echoes the longing of that must cross the pass toward reunification.
The concept of to which the artist has held fast is not an expression of the passive sentiment of a people who endured long and bitter centuries, but a hope and a national vitality—gathering as one, praying for the road ahead, and singing it. Works drawing on the 'sea pine' of Jeju and the 'juniper' of Onyang lay bare the life force of the trees themselves. The artist now connects the vitality of Arirang not through direct mediators such as the janggu or the drum, but through the very life of trees and grasses. And that living energy brings even the air and the reaches of cosmic space to life.
In 〈Arirang〉, that vitality expands all the way to the stars. Viewed up close, the drawn constellation-lines may even feel schematic; but step back a little and they sink into a sown, sprouting texture, and within an infinitely expanding indigo space, yellow stars rise stride by stride toward the viewer. Whereas his works tend to give a strongly closed impression—thick contours that reveal form, and the dense fields of color that fill them—here one glimpses the possibility of an opening.
Of late the artist is keenly attuned to the sound of the woods around his studio. On the road home from the countryside, wildflowers caught suddenly in the headlights speak to him. Their forms, never felt in daily life, take hold of him. An eye held open, free of fixation on subject matter, receives a charged field of communion that lets him approach things more deeply—so that a single object becomes a cry that reflects the whole world. At a glance it may seem unrelated to our tradition, yet the expression of 'gi' (氣) steeped within it, and the unadorned mountain forms, are unmistakably ours. If anything, it renews our regret that another lineage—one that sets out from the old formal language of Jeong Seon to inherit and transcend it—has been severed in our art world.

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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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