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Once again, we find ourselves putting together a special feature on painting. The concept is a continuation of “Painting: Is It Changing?” from the December 2020 issue, and the keyword this time is “abstract.” We live in a day and age in which the word “abstract” has become ambiguous, yet abstraction does unquestionably exist before us as a creative phenomenon. We recall this abstraction in terms of “painting.” How has painting preserved its identity in the contemporary landscape? How does it respond to a fast-changing visual environment? What are the critical issues in 21st-century painting? Are there any truly new transformations? What distinguishes young painters in their 30s and 40s from the generations that came before them? How has painting incorporated today’s environment of omniscient smartphones? How should we view the future of painting? Art in Culture has put together a large-scale feature that asks and answers some of these contemporary questions about painting. To begin with, six experts used “abstraction” as a standard for selecting a group of painters in their 30s and 40s. These experts were Kho Chung-hwan, Kim Yong-dae, Ahn Soyeon, Yoo Jinsang, Michael Lim (aka Chungwoo Lee), and Hyun Seewon. Together, they selected 39 artists in all. To compile images of the selected artists’ work, the editorial board categorized them into four subtopics based on form, content, materials, and techniques. These subtopics are “Flatness and Materiality: The Endless Battle,” “New Abstraction: Meta-Formative-Practice,” “Painting Expands in Time and Space,” and “Beyond the Boundaries of Expression: The Hybrid Forest.” Second, an online roundtable was organized to conduct contemporary painting discourse. There, Kim Boggi, Yoo Jinsang, and Michael Lim examined currents in contemporary art to illuminate the role of painting from multiple perspectives. In the process, they paid close attention to examples of overseas work and painting trends among young Korean artists.

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Flatness and Materiality: The Endless Battle

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If there is one term that sums up Modernism during the 20th century, it may be 'abstract painting.' Originating in a stubborn repudiation of the illusory nature of representational painting, abstract painting ascended to the throne of contemporary art against the backdrop of Clement Greenberg’s “formalism” critique. Adopting Kant’s critical philosophy as a central pillar, Greenberg declared that the crux of modernism was the exploration of the purity of self-critique—in other words, abstract painting, which was confined to the two-dimensionality of the canvas that provided its physical support. Greenberg’s formalist aesthetic was repudiated with the advent of postmodernism, but it continued to have an enormous impact on contemporary art discourse even after that. Delving into “flatness” and “materiality,” abstract painting still exhibits immense power. Today’s abstract painters incorporate the visual media and conditions of a new era as they broaden the horizons of “two-dimensionality.” The lineage of pure abstraction has been carried on by the abundantly rhythmic images evoked by Ha Tae Im’s variegated color bands, and the color field painting of Yoon Jongju, which conveys a quiet tension with its subtle color development. Jung Jae-chul and Chung Seokwoo capture the intense primal emotions and energy behind human desires, emblazoning them in powerful brushstrokes and thick matière. There have also been attempts to rejuvenate contemporary abstraction through the diversification of materials and techniques. Yoon Sang Yuel and Pyoun Daesik respectively employ the mechanical pencil and regular pencil as their chief tool in an endless, lonely, taxing confrontation with two-dimensionality. Kim Yisu paints landscapes with “micro-differences” in monotone, using such un-painterly materials as plaster cloth, acrylic boxes, and tape. Choi Sun explores an anti-contemporary art aesthetic through abstract images using organic materials such as saliva and waste material. Additionally, some artists are successors to postmodernism, with its experiments in the abstract representation of the object and blending with other art genres. Shin Soohyeok presents the structures of urban architecture through subtly rippling grid landscapes; Sen Chung paints geometric crystals on canvases that allow viewers to sense the shading differences of ink-and-wash paintings; and Park Jong Kyu presents the “noises” of the digital environment as a painting language.

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Choi Sun〈Forsythia〉, acrylic on canvas, 194×150cm, 2017, Image provided by Art In Culture.

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Choi Sun Choi Sun pushes back against the authority of modernism that disregards social issues. He subverts conventional abstract painting with his use of “humble” materials—most prominently saliva, waste material, and seawater. Prone to corrosion or evaporation, his materials repudiate the “eternality” of art, stripping away the illusions of contemporary art. With 〈Forsythia〉, he presents vomit on a roadside as a forsythia plant in full bloom, reexamining our perceptions of “ugliness.”

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Ha Tae Im〈Un Passage No.201018〉, acrylic on canvas, 162×130cm, 2020, Image provided by Art In Culture.

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Ha Tae Im While studying in France, Ha Tae Im adopted variegated color bands as a key artistic language and non-linguistic response to the issue of communication. With the layered color bands that she paints, she mixes colors and light to form rhythmic compositions: “The repetition and difference of the color bands is an experience of color remembered differently by each viewer’s unique body, as well as a melody that creates harmonies with the highness and lowness of its tones.”

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Kim Yisu〈Inframince-Landscape〉, translucent tape on acrylic board, acrylic, 80×60cm, 2017, Image provided by Art In Culture.

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Kim Yisu A concept developed by Marcel Duchamp, inframince refers to infinitesimal difference. Kim Yisu explores inframince landscapes through the use of various materials including plaster cloth, paper, acrylic boxes, and tape. Her monotone canvases are landscapes of constantly forming and disappearing boundaries. They evoke thoughts of Mother Nature such as the sea or earth.

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Yoon Jongju〈Cherish The Time-Line(Blue)〉, acrylic on canvas, medium, 60×180cm, 2020, Image provided by Art In Culture.

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Yoon Jongju Yoon Jongju creates a diverse sense of space and color by pouring a mixture of pigments in a medium over dozens of base layers of acrylic paint on a canvas. She arranges subtly nuanced color field panels in vertical and horizontal directions, experimenting with the logic of Modernism that equates painting form with content.

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Yoon Sang Yuel〈Silence〉, paper, mechanical pencil on acrylic, digital printing, 71.5×46.5cm, 2019 , Image provided by Art In Culture

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Yoon Sang Yuel The 〈Silence〉 series are produced with innumerable mechanical pencil lines ranging in thickness between 0.3 and 0.9 millimeters. Sharp and incisive, the lines allude to the artist’s fear of life. Even a seemingly perfect straight line bears the marks of his trembling hand. Recently, he has been amplifying the fine line effect in his work by placing film or acrylic boards with digitally printed lines over his hand-drawn lines on paper—disrupting the boundary between the analog and digital.

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Pyoun Daesik〈Black Lead Mirror(鉛鏡)〉, pencil on wood panel, 244×122cm 2019, Image provided by Art In Culture.

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Pyoun Daesik Pyoun Daesik uses the pencil, that most basic of tools, to battle with painting. He applies the pencil over paint on the surface of sleek wood panels in a process that takes a long time and demands repetitive effort. Sparkling with graphite powder, his canvas reflects his theme of the “material conversion of time.” The work stands like an enormous mirror of the abyss. Pyoun has recently continued experimenting with the flow of time and changes in materiality, pouring saltwater onto his panels to produce paintings with the resulting salt crystals.

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Jung Jae-chul〈Contradictory Boundary〉, oil on canvas, 162×112cm, 2019, Image provided by Art In Culture.

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Jung Jae-chul Jung Jae-chul’s artwork represents human subjects in abstract ways. The artist focuses on human faces out of an interest in the social issues spawned by contradictory human desires. In his faces, the eyes, noses, and mouths are completely crushed. Within these flattened human portraits, the artist finds primal emotions.

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Chung Seokwoo〈Organ Valley #16〉, oil on canvas, 227.3×181.8cm, 2020, Image provided by Art In Culture.

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Chung SeokwooChung Seokwoo employs the basic elements of painting—such as color, brushstrokes, and matière—to create images of disorder. The resulting chaos emits a primal energy that does not exist in these days. His large painting project 〈Organ Valley〉 represents the process of an organism growing, from its organs to its muscles, skeleton, and skin.

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Shin Soohyeok 〈No.2016〉, 131×162cm, 〈No. 2014〉, 194×260cm, oil on canvas,2019, Image provided by Art In Culture.

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Shin Soohyeok Early in his painting career, Shin Soohyeok produced a monochrome painting that depicted a building exterior in pencil. From there, he broadened his scope into renderings of everyday urban spaces in bright blue tones. Recently, he has made a transition into abstract painting work inspired by the grid structures of architecture and cities. With the endless crisscrossing of fine vertical and horizontal lines, he gives an impression of weaving thread. Communicating a sense of minute vibrations, his lines allude to the fissures between continuity and disruption, existence and nonexistence.

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Sen Chung,〈Untitled〉, oil on canvas, 50×40cm, 2019, Image provided by Art In Culture.

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Sen Chung Sen Chung is an artist based in the German city of Düsseldorf. His philosophy of painting views it as a “form through which thoughts about the world linger as marks.” Though he works with oil paints on canvas, he achieves an effect like the varied shading of ink-and-wash painting with his “minus brushstrokes,” with which he wipes away the paint he has applied. His paintings resonate with a subtle rhythmic quality created by the minimal use of lines, shapes, and colors alone. Kim Sung Woo has said, “The paintings that Sen Chung produces are an act of opening up a world that will endlessly accept all things [. . .] the next world that had not been visible before.”

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Park Jong Kyu,〈~Kreuzen 2020〉,acrylic on canvas, 130.3×97cm, 2020, Image provided by Art In Culture.

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Park Jong Kyu Park Jong Kyu represents the “noise” of sounds through his use of points and lines formed by pixels, the basic units of the digital image. His series 〈~Kreuzen〉, named after the German word for “to cruise,” involves him painstakingly painting in acrylic over pixel images of noise from the digital environment. With his work across genres of painting, video, installation, and media art, Park has been chipping away at modernism’s focus on the visual.

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※ This article, originally published in the July 2021 issue of Art in Culture, is provided by the Korea Art Management Service under a content provision agreement with the magazine.

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