Again, we find ourselves putting together a special issue on painting. The concept is a continuation of “Painting: Is It Changing?” from our 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 has put together a large-scale issue 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.
Painting Expands in Time and Space
Amid the influence of postmodernism since the mid-20th century, existing distinctions of artistic genre and medium have become increasingly meaningless. The “post-medium” discourse of Rosalind Krauss established a justification for artistic forms that blend art with non-art and artistic media with technical media. Painting began subverting its own formalism and its associated explorations of thin surfaces and paints, focusing its attention instead on the three-dimensionality of the canvas itself and what lies beyond it. Pioneers of this approach include Donald Judd, who rendered color field abstraction three-dimensional with his cube reliefs, and Robert Smithson, who treated the earth and sea as his pedestals. With the minimalist work of Judd and others, there was also a newfound emphasis on the concept of situationally dependent “theatricality,” which incorporated the physical experience of the viewer. The resulting paintings expand into space with volume and mass, capturing our gaze with their increased versatility. What form has contemporary abstract painting taken in Korea, which experienced all of this painting history in an accelerated fashion? Suki Seokyeong Kang adapts the traditional concepts of modernist painting—including frames, grids, and planes—into Korean traditional aesthetic and sculptural forms. Baek Kyungho and Park Kyung Ryul each define the canvas and brush as an artistic object, practicing a methodology along the lines of installation art. Lee Hyein recontextualizes illusion and reality by juxtaposing her canvases with objects such as tree branches that she discovers during her sketches. Fay Shin emphasizes the everyday nature of art viewing with display stands that present color field abstraction representations of the physical perception of changing weather. Bek Hyunjin incorporates his various professional identities into his creative process, blending painterly gestures with sculpture, music, and performance. Meanwhile, more and more abstract painters have recently been emerging in the art scene from the generation that has fully internalized the digital environment. These are artists who alternate between the virtual and real worlds as they broaden the spatial scope of painting into non-physical settings. Chung Heemin uses a gel medium to materialize the untouchable textures of the digital world, while Park Jung Hae renders real and virtual objects in flattened, origami-like forms. Ahn Sanghoon constructs loose narratives by assigning non-representational abstract painting images with random titles found online. Lee Heejoon creates abstract expressionist works that use images of digital landscapes taken by the artist as their supporting frame.
Bek Hyunjin, Biodegradable Thing: 21-03 (left), 21-02 (right), eco-friendly paint on biodegradable canvas, 141 × 251 cm, 2021
Bek Hyunjin Bek Hyunjin is active as an artist, performer, musician, and actor. His painting work typically includes landscapes rendered in abstract form with circles, triangles, and rectangles. The new work presented at his recent solo exhibition Beyond Works (PKM Gallery) threw open a new chapter of exhibiting, appreciating, and interpreting paintings. In addition to giving performances in which he throws out “hints” about his creative process, Bek also accompanies his paintings with music or shines psychedelic lighting on them in exhibitions. This exemplifies the approach of “contemplating time and action” that runs through his painting work.
Park Kyung Ryul, Welcome, oil and mixed media on canvas and paper, variable installation, 2019
Park Kyung Ryul Park Kyung Ryul focuses on the limitations of two-dimensional painting. As a way of broadening the scope of painting beyond these limits, she has devised the genre of “sculptural painting.” Her strategy involves recognizing the brushstrokes in painting as “objects” in their own right and expanding them beyond the canvas. By incorporating even the gravity and time of spaces outside her canvas as elements of her painting work, she creates an “anti-two-dimensional world,” presenting a pictorial space that transcends dimension as viewers are drawn into the canvas.
Baek Kyungho, Look Out for Me, oil on canvas, acrylic, conte, 216.8 × 130.3 × 128 cm, 2012
Baek Kyungho To Baek Kyungho, the canvas is not merely the physical support for a painting. His work has employed the canvas as an object, combining it with human forms and allowing it to become a setting not only for abstraction but for experimentation with other styles. Baek sometimes imitates the style of famous 20th-century artists or casually includes landscapes from everyday life. Recently, he has been developing pictorial “textiles,” inspired by stripe patterns that hold no profound meaning.
Fay Shin, Weather Painting—Today’s New Edition, spray paint on canvas, angle, 155 × 135 × 60 cm, 2015
Fay Shin Fay Shin’s Weather Painting series is the artist’s keen reaction to changes in the seasons. The thinly applied spray paint color particles allude to the atmosphere and the way it changes from one day to the next. She accentuates the ordinary nature of art viewing by casually placing her work on display cases resembling newspaper stands, which are crafted from angled metal. With her solo exhibition Air within Us (Gallery Su, 2020), she explored an expansion into the three-dimensional realm by hanging her fabric works in midair in the exhibition venue.
Suki Seokyeong Kang, Face exhibition, Commonwealth and Council, 2020
Suki Seokyeong Kang Viewed from the outside, Suki Seokyeong Kang’s work employs typical forms of sculpture, but she also incorporates key concepts of modernist painting, including frames, grids, rectangles, and planes. Face takes the form of an installation that blends flatness and volume within three-dimensional space, but Kang has also represented different spaces with her “spatial drawings.” In her Well series (2012–15), she employs the Joseon-era musical notation system known as jeongganbo to serve as a physical and conceptual frame for works of painting.
Chung Heemin, A Portrait of a Drenched Dog (left), Early A.M. Attitude (right), acrylic, oil, and gel medium on canvas, 182 × 182 cm/80 × 100 cm, 2019
Chung Heemin Chung Heemin transports the intangible objects, symbols, and spaces of the digital world onto the canvas. Using masking tape and airbrushing, she paints carefully, as though splitting her images into tiny pixels made up of bits. The translucent gel medium that often appears in her work adds a sense of volume to the flat liquid crystals. While the artist takes the digital world as her source material, she does not lose sight of the desire for a tangible real-world quality desired by the viewer.
Park Jung Hae, Aesthetic Sorrow, linen and acrylic on wood panel, 100 × 100 cm, 2016
Park Jung Hae Park Jung Hae presents square canvases that capture a multifarious world combining the real with the virtual. To achieve this, she has consistently developed expressive techniques to create images that seem to have been flattened out or folded. Recently, she has explored her interest in light more deeply, treating the canvas as a window as she represents the colors of daily life and nature. This work is a landscape of flat objects viewed through green and yellow filters.
Lee Hyein, Mom—Looking Inside, acrylic and inkjet printing on linen, 200 × 190 cm, 2019
Lee Hyein Lee Hyein’s painting work began with her reconstruction of childhood landscapes based on her memories. Afterwards, she began creating paintings based on a strict methodology of sketching in different places where she briefly sojourns. With Mom—Looking Inside, she presents her thoughts about her mother through drawings, glitter film collage, and objects, which are displayed on a pedestal. At her recent solo exhibition One day, stepping on the weather (Gallery Kiche, 2020), she exhibited a branch from the scene of one of her sketches alongside the landscape depicted on canvas—juxtaposing an actual object with its pictorial representation.
Ahn Sanghoon, On special days, we need a story—not to wait alone, to remain forgotten solo exhibition, Gallery Chosun, 2020
Ahn Sanghoo Even as they formally carry on the tradition of “painting-like paintings,” Ahn Sanghoon’s paintings chart new territory in painting during the digital era. The artist searches online for the serial numbers for photographs of his work, selecting random words and sentences that he then uses as titles for the paintings. This gesture is aimed at introducing narrative while parting ways with metaphysical concepts. He has broadened the scope of his painting to stages such as temporary walls in galleries, floors, plastic, and building surfaces.
Lee Heejoon, Velvet Curtain, acrylic on canvas, photomontage, 260 × 260 cm, 2021
Lee Heejoon Early on in his career, Lee Heejoon presented works of abstract painting that reduced the forms and structures of urban architecture into geometric shapes. With his later series such as Biei and Floating Floor, he used photography as a medium for representing the architectural landscapes he had seen from the perspective of a “traveler.” By the time of The Tourist, his photographs were no longer simply a reference—they had changed roles with the painting’s support, appearing directly on the canvas. The traces of paint in various shapes on top of the image are an index for the erased colors and textures of the original landscape and object in the black-and-white photograph.
※ 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.
-
-
Critic / People - 11 Dec 2017Koo Jeong A: Stories of an Ambiguous World Transforming
