Mt. Geumgang — Vitality

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• Text Review 2001-08-01 · Kang Tae-seong

  "Mt. Geumgang, 'para-doxa'" — Kang Tae-seong review (2001)

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  Text Review 2001-08-01 · Kang Tae-seong

  "Mt. Geumgang, 'para-doxa'" — Kang Tae-seong review (2001)

  Outside the room where I am now staying, between spaces of modern Baroque and Neoclassical style — at once austere and ornately decorated — several very narrow paths thread along. Like chimneys, the narrowly opened passages assail one's nose with the acrid exhaust of cars. What I feel here is the parallel coexistence of past splendor and present "smoke." Such parallel coexistences appear together with historical relics — the current G8 summit in Italy and the killing of one who took part in the anti-globalisation movement — and make legible a structure in which several axes of meaning coexist. This coexistent and paradoxical structure is visible in the works to be shown at Shin Jang-sik's forthcoming solo exhibition, and the parallelism now made visible lets us think of his multilayered structure all the more meaningfully.

  The works to be presented in this exhibition take Mt. Geumgang as their subject. For us, Mt. Geumgang carries more than the meaning of a famous mountain. It is at once our famous mountain, a fact of division, and yet another demilitarized zone (?). It is a space where the limited freedom of visiting is felt as tragic, and at the same time a "paradoxical" place felt as beautiful. That is, it is the place where countless circumstances and histories of our modern era are interwoven, and a symbol of the sharp and intricate political situation now unfolding between South and North Korea and across Northeast Asia.

  Such a subject is further emphasized in contrast with its meaning as history — with the temporal axis to the past. The artist began to paint "Mt. Geumgang" from the time when we could not go there. Mt. Geumgang was a "nature" to be recovered — that is, Korea's nature — a space holding our hopes and our circumstances, while at the same time being the "empty space" we could not visit. The contents of such a subject appear in the exhibition through various works. The beautiful form of Mt. Geumgang appears in painting; the various critical, meditative, and reflective meanings — as varied situations — appear in the three-dimensional works.

  His work 〈Mt. Geumgang Manmulsang — November 21, 1998〉 is divided into several panels, with landscape and figures partially overlapping. The figures are South Koreans who accompanied the artist, linked to meanings outside the painting — the political, economic, and natural-environmental context. The work, while wholly the same Mt. Geumgang in overlapping space, is staged through a "set-apart," severed character that shows a different face from the present condition between South and North. The set-apart space, the severed surface, lets the viewer infer a more fragmented circumstance and brings us to recognize the present condition: a place that is at once our land and not — one that cannot be visited and yet has come to be visitable.

  This artist holds a vision different from past Korean modernist art. As one sees in his "meditation" and cheongsachorong (traditional blue-and-red silk lantern) subjects, his work begins from a relation with the contexte (con-text) — that which lies outside the painting. That is, his work links historical character with sociality and other contemporary traits (con-temporary). Here, too, we may "consider" together the "con" of contemporaneity and context. I take the "con" (cum), meaning "with," to think of the "other thing or person" as something simultaneously relational, and I read Levinas's other "self" (alter ego) as a relational comprehension of the other. The other is not only an independent absolute unit but a being that, while another self, is at the same time mutually relational and contextual. The relationship of beings — humans, and the others to be with — within a new context, the possibility of harmony, can be spoken of in his painting. Such an understanding and reflection upon context gives his work a structure of discourse spoken together with the context outside the painting, distinct from a wholly self-referential modernism.

  What draws still further interest here is that the context presented in the work is offered paradoxically rather than serving the merely referential function of pointing to the "present reality" outright. As one example, the theme and subject of "meditation," together with the figures in the installations, juxtaposes facts from different time-axes. The parallelism in his work may be read as a still more parallel opinion (para-doxa). In the works he made while observing and painting Mt. Geumgang during his several visits, one can grasp the parallel character of Korea — the meaning of South and North — and the very unnatural space separated within that parallel condition. And yet, because Mt. Geumgang is the beautiful mountain that is the pride of our people, in its many contextual meanings it is also a paradoxical (paradoxe) space.

  His painting, within this parallel space, shows two frames: "present reality / negation." The reality may be seen as the representation the subject carries, and through the parallel display it acquires the meaning of negation. The parallel revealed in this juxtaposition is the state in which two distinguished units are kept just as they are. That is, parallelism is the maintaining of several units unmixed — carrying meanings of "distinction," "severance," "rupture." In his series of paintings, there is a fundamental difference between the acts of "painting" and "flinging" lines, and this emphasizes the parallelism.

  The flung lines repeatedly form a sparse space tangled in varied colors — yellows, reds. Seen from afar these colors appear richly varied, but up close one finds, alongside the colors, countless needles thrust through the surface, arriving with a meaning utterly different from that of the distant view.

  His paradoxical, parallel space is dually constituted along the distance between close and far points of view. The earlier painted layer and the later layer in his paintings can likewise be understood through this same duality. This duality is "paradox," carrying negation. In this case, the two distinct characters carry expressive heterogeneity while presenting the character of negation. Such negativity contrasts in mode of expression — the painted line and the flung line, the intentional line and the line in which the unconscious and chance partake — and presents a multilayered consciousness. This space of multiple meaning and expression paradoxically emphasizes a "double-layered narrative structure."

  The figural casts taken from the artist himself are arrayed in parallel within the exhibition space. In their beautiful yet somewhat dreadful appearance one finds his paradoxical character (autumn leaves — bruise), and the plurality of meaning can be grasped through parallel viewing. The dual character of far and near — the painted mountain and the flung paint layer atop it — can be read as a dual structure.

  That is, the relation between the first painted layer (A) and the later flung layer (B) yields two parallel meaning-relations — the same dual character as that of close and far in the cast figures. Here, importantly, an order of meaning arises. His priority is the side that appears first — the view from afar; the structure read afterward becomes the latter narrative. These two distinct structures read before and after do not seem to be the kind of subject in which one chooses between them selectively. Rather than an "a or b" meaning-structure (a selective structure that is true if either a or b alone is true), it is an "a and b" structure. This is the coexistence of "a and b" — what Plato termed the meaning of "negation," "alteration," the structure that "others" things. His work, in that sense, can be called a difference between two things — a difference in distance, a difference on the surface.

  The identity and repetition discovered in the repeated presentation of multiple identical figures — figural casts of the artist arrayed across the exhibition space in heterogeneous variety — compose a complex meaning-space. Seen from afar, the sculptures shimmering like fish-scales of actual needles (the scale-needle structure) and the autumn-leaf — bruise (colors that appear, from afar, as beautiful as autumn leaves and, up close, like the impression of bruised blood) — these dual-structured sculptures are shown in parallel. That is, they convey "stacked sounds" of varied meanings, or accumulated significations. Such works open a space of negation and paradox — "stacked sounds" — distinct from the "stillness" the theme of "meditation" implies. His parallelism and paradox can be read as carrying a most significant meaning in the present unfolding of art.

  — Kang Tae-seong, August 1, 2001

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• Text Review 2001-10-01 · Yang Jeong-mu

  "Shin Jang-sik Exhibition" — Yang Jeong-mu review (2001)

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  Text Review 2001-10-01 · Yang Jeong-mu

  "Shin Jang-sik Exhibition" — Yang Jeong-mu review (2001)

  Some ten years have passed since Shin Jang-sik first drew Mt. Geumgang — forgotten since the division — back out of 〈Painting Collection of the Nation〉 and set to work on it. Is it the weight of those years that has turned his Mt. Geumgang from an object of mystical worship toward an object of his own emotional expression? Shin Jang-sik's 〈Meditation — Mt. Geumgang〉 exhibition is the eighth game he has played on the theme of Mt. Geumgang. In this exhibition too, the peaks of his Mt. Geumgang remained blue, and the dripping and dotting continued. But the brushstroke conventions (junbeop) of eighteenth-century Joseon masters that he had been borrowing, and the segmented sense of form of nineteenth-century minhwa, have receded considerably; in their place have come realistic composition, light and shadow, and clearly defined ridges. In a word, his Mt. Geumgang is now concrete.

  Until now, his statements about Mt. Geumgang were in fact indirect. As proved by the dripping that flooded the surface as if to negate the finished picture, Mt. Geumgang was for him an object of veneration not to be approached easily. The immediate cause of the change was, no doubt, the trips to Mt. Geumgang made possible by the sea route opened under the "Sunshine Policy." Yet his transformation cannot be dismissed as a mere "aftereffect of the field trip."

  Among the works in this exhibition, I single out 〈Mt. Geumgang Manmulsang — November 21, 1998〉. Here Shin Jang-sik broke the Mt. Geumgang unfolding before his eyes down across eight canvases, shattering it into pieces. The mystery had begun to break. The tone of that breaking is low, as if in keeping with the artist's temperament. In the air of the exhibition space float eleven hanji (mulberry paper) sculptures cast from the artist's own body. These replicated, cross-legged figures of the painter — seeming to face and meditate upon the picture-planes that occupy each wall of the gallery — tell us that the deeper subject of this exhibition is the artist himself. Having walked and felt, with his own feet, the days and nights of Mt. Geumgang beyond the wire fence, he came to gaze deeply into himself rather than into the mountain, and that feeling is inscribed, without concealment, on the surface of the sculptures.

  If the slight dissonance one feels among the eleven hanji sculptures can be resolved (the simple, repetitive coloring on the surface of some seems somewhat removed from the formal vocabulary he has carried until now), his work will stand as a clear example that Mt. Geumgang can be resurrected — not as an object of longing and worship but, as it has long been, as a wellspring of inspiration for the self-expression of Korean artists.

  — Yang Jeong-mu, Professor, Korea National University of Arts

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