The Way of Thinking that Heterogenizes the Present -Cha Seungjoo (Curator, Arko Art Center, Arts Council Korea)
For an artist
who thinks not through language but through images, the blockage of reason is
the disappearance of language for communication. Therefore, the act of paining
itself is a kind of self-discipline for her to keep thinking, which often
entails pain. Just like the miniature painted like one embroiders on the canvas
stitch by stitch, the densely packed tree branches and the closely connected,
luxuriant leaves are felt like the fruit of patience that has replaced ascetic
process with images.
However, the
language of thought that she selects becomes a game and play during the
combining process, and due to this, the way of changing the expanding meaning,
the way of expanding the meaning, becomes the most important factor for
visualizing the thinking. In other words, her language of thought, freed in the
imaginary world, meets the ideal landscape and infinitely opens up space for
her to represent her who lives in the real world.
Here, the ideal
landscape she has chosen is linked to the time and space of the past when the
traditional landscape painting spread. The charm of oriental painting to her,
who majored in it, is a new world of great possibilities due to its scarcity.
In today`s artistic climate, it is not easy to encounter paintings that deal
with subject-matters that appear in traditional oriental paintings, using
traditional materials such as the traditional Korean papers like Hanji and
Jangji, Chinese ink, and powder pigments. Given this situation, the material
and thematic elements of oriental painting are even more fresh for her. Her work
is characterized by painting ink-and-wash colors on Jangji first, then
accepting the limitations of powder pigments which cannot afford various rich
colors, and making the most of them. In addition to this methodological aspect,
the power of story, which individual images included in the canvas generate in
relation to each other, not only evokes the simplicity and static emotions of
oriental painting but also acts as a basis for making her work special.
The word
‘thinking’ frequently appears in the titles of her works: ‘Forest of Thinking’,
‘Landscape of Thinking’, ‘Island of Thinking’, ‘Colors of Thinking’. For her,
thinking remains in space, has colors, is isolated, and at times tries to talk
with things and living organisms. The titles of her works are direct linguistic
expressions of her psychological state, which is derived from thinking, and
furthermore, they are signs of the objects depicted in the canvas. And this,
relatively quickly, expands the audience`s zone of sympathy for the work.
Here, in order
to understand the artist`s wish to ‘provide a time for rest and thinking to
find a moment for joy that has been forgotten in our hectic life’, we need to
look into the way of ‘thinking’ that penetrates the whole of her work. To this
end, I would like to pay attention to the temporal distance that her works lead
to, the way in which meanings take place in her works, and the connection to
the physical space in which each work is actually placed. First of all, the two
elements that can escape the purview of modern people, who are familiar with
the busy urban life, are probably the element of tradition at a temporal
distance and the element of nature at a physical distance. And the combination
of these two is the driving force behind the main imagery of Kim Minjoo`s work.
So her paintings are filled with the energy of lyrical and tranquil nature, and
carry the traditional beauty of margins that were taken away by the world of
brilliant images. Since her paintings do not show at least an artificial
arrangement of nature led by a human crowd or an anthropocentric visual system,
they provide an opportunity to be humble in the face of the wonder and
sublimity of the enormous natural world. In some ways, this seems to be an
attempt to narrow the psychological gap between oriental painting and
contemporary art by reproducing and following the composition and
subject-matters of traditional landscape paintings. The focus, however, is on
the way of creating meaning by individual images that are arranged like hidden
pictures to bring in cracks in time and space of representation.
And this is
possible because ‘tradition’ for the artist may be a realm of ‘fa’, somewhere
beyond reality. For her, who has never made reference to a specific oriental
painting, traditional oriental paintings are a world of possibilities that have
‘plain’ impressions and material peculiarity, in which she can give free rein
to her imagination. In other words, the artist uses traditional elements but
connects her imagery as a young artist, who lives in the contemporary world, to
the form of an age-old painting genre, and learns how to heterogenize her
present that passed though the time of tradition that she has never
experienced.
Here, her
thinking becomes play, humor and game in the crack where the scenery of nature
represented by traditional landscape painting overlaps with the objects and
living organisms of reality, and the boundary between illusion and reality
becomes blurred. For example, the modern building is filled with elements of
oriental landscape painting, and the table, which implies a space for personal
thinking, coexists with the elements of traditional landscape painting; yet it
gains a universal quality through its ordinary shape itself. On the other hand,
the images that are repeatedly appear include ‘small table’, ‘ferryboat moored
in the forest’, ‘the back of the naked body whose face cannot be known’,
‘mermaid’, and ‘fishing nets with holes’.
These usually
appear as small parts that may be easily overlooked in the ideal reality that
has mediated the images of Great Nature, or they are disturbances that suddenly
intrude into a static landscape of nature. For example, the ferryboat that is
supposed to float on the river in a leisurely manner is moored in the forest or
half-submerged in the river, only partly showing its shape, and the full shape
of the mermaid is hard to figure out.
In addition,
the landscape depicting a shape similar to an island directly expresses
isolation, or sometimes the conduit for water represents attempts to find a
‘way’ of direction, and the representing the polysemy of language. And in this
way she adds images of metaphors that signify the lack and breakaway behind the
plenitude of natural images, to reveal the way in which the language of thought
and the state of thinking coexist. What is important here is that her language
for thinking has more extensibility than when it is in the traditional subject
matters. For example, her free play can be implemented by borrowing the titles
and styles of the works of traditional landscape paintings (Conversation
between Fisherman and Woodcutter, Sightseeing throughout Nature, Bookshelf
Painting, etc.).
As for
Conversation between Fisherman and Woodcutter, the work brings in the
conversation between the fisherman and woodcutter, a major motif of traditional
landscape painting, and changes it into a narrative in which the fisherman has
become a fish and the woodcutter has become a tree. The traditional bookshelf
painting depicting stationery, antiques, and other objects around the bookshelf
and books is reborn as Landscape for Thinking in which various rooms (for
thinking) are gathered. Within it, there is a huge bookcase in which the rooms
for thinking that have existed individually gather and scatter. And the
components in the bookcase are connected to each other, and sometimes they
build independent spaces. It looks like a portfolio of thoughts that has put
the paintings done for the past few years together into a single canvas. At a
time when the artist needed to gather all of the scattered fragments of thought
and paintings and organized them, she found a way of realizing that once again
in the traditional motif of the ‘bookshelf painting’.
It seems that
this way, the elements that penetrate her work, such as tradition and
modernity, pain and play, fantasy and reality, I and others, seem to present a
way of compromising for coexistence, minimizing the heterogeneous tension that
arises at the boundaries. The appearance of the mermaid mentioned earlier also
incorporates part of the other person who in fact makes up one`s self.
To her, who
chose the painting with the characteristic of boundaries for a means of
thinking, understanding the boundaries and learning a unique way of coexistence
contribute to the inner calm of her paintings and also relieve the restriction
of the physical space in which the drawings are placed, leading to the
diversity of the form of work. In other words, when the individual works
containing the forms and colors of thought are considered as spaces for
thought, the attitude of expanding the seemingly closed space of the canvas or
the frame appears by applying the traditional landscape painting method such as
folding screen, picture book, bookshelf painting, and picture scroll.
Hence, we see
her work on the space for thinking fully unfolded in the frame; on the elements
of the frame disassembled, segmented, and expanded into individual frames and
spaces to be expanded into several different spaces for thinking; on a single
canvas, in which the space for thinking is divided to connect the links
together. And she goes on to experiment not only with the boldness of the
installation, but also with the various components of the work-such as dividing
lines and colors themselves, and painting props for drawing as a series. The
accumulation of these experiments has shaped the details of formal and thematic
changes that have occurred in her solo exhibition in recent years. And there is
another drastic move in the methodology that she will try in the future: trying
new colors, collaborating with professionals in other fields, and
reinterpreting traditional paintings based on works for reference. As one of
these attempts, this exhibition showcases a large eight-fold screen with a
landscape painting based on the The Eight Views of Xiaoxiang of the Joseon
Dynasty.
This is another
mode of self-discipline through which she wants to control herself within
external stimuli and restrictions, a new move when compared to her work so far
that transferred a free imagination without a reference to the canvas borrowing
from the materials for oriental painting. It may be that she tries to find the
source of her own work though more in-depth training within almost extreme
rigor, and reflect more intense energy of freedom coming from momentary
imagination within a kind of constraint. The new works born from this process
appear to follow the elements of traditional landscape painting on the four
seasons. However, the subtle devices of reinterpretation in her paintings will
be an exciting opportunity to get a glimpse of the language of her thought that
she acquired though the new works she made for this exhibition. In the past few
years, her room of speculation has gradually tried to make a connection with
the outside through the gap opening by piecemeal. For her as an artist of
oriental painting, who has faced the inner speculation and visualized the
language of agonies and amusements, staying at the border is no longer an
option but a major stimulus to support her life. So her work seems to have a
tendency that and, within an increasingly refined language, takes away some of
the inner desire, and waits for an encounter with outside possibilities. This
is why we are paying attention to the minute changes that her work will bring
about in the future.