A Painting Capturing the Whole Landscape
The
world seen through Kim Hyunchul¡¯s painting is clear and bright. The landscape which
is represented by the brush of an artist who has long studied and investigated
the true-view landscape gives an opportunity to experience the dignified
spirit. Without detailed representation or expression of the views of islands
or the sea, his paintings endlessly expand our field of vision to both sides. The
horizontal line drawn boldly is simple but well optimized to reveal the deep
and broad independency of nature. Nature in his
paintings is in itself the ¡®whole.¡¯ His exquisite choice of emptiness and
concentration is intended for experiencing a time-space not as a set of
fragments but as a whole image. The unexpectedly emptied areas and the colored
squares are an aggregate of brush strokes arranged neatly and clearly. The impression that his paintings
are not only alive and breathing but also have integrity is very essential to
this traditional Korean painter. Today, it seems to be almost impossible to
look at an object carefully and for a long time. The view seen by Kim is a free
play of points, lines, and planes brought onto the flat surface, as an
independent time-space which was created after pondering long over a real
time-space and reducing lots of misunderstandings and idle thoughts lingering between
¡®seeing¡¯ and ¡®painting.¡¯ However, what should not be neglected is that this
free play of painting, which refreshes our mind, was based on his exhaustive
study of traditional paintings. The audience, too, realizes that all this came
entirely from the artist¡¯s immersion in traditional Korean painting, that is,
his years of investigation and persistent inquiry into the ¡®ways of seeing¡¯ developed
in this land.
For the
artist, this study of the true-view painting of Gyeomjae Jeong Seon (1676–1759)
and the unique presence of painting established in the Korean context, at this
time of 2016, paved the way for establishing his own modern form of traditional
Korean painting. As a journey of long investigation to find his style of
traditional Korean painting, he spent many hours in imitating and studying
renowned traditional painting while working as a researcher in Kansong Museum. Imitating
Early Spring, a hanging scroll
painting by the Northern Song painter Guo Xi (ca. 1020-1090) which has been
regarded as a classic and the standard reference for East Asian painting, and studying
the style of Jeong Seon who perfected the true-view landscape painting in the
later Joseon dynasty, Kim tried hard to master the Asian way of seeing, not
Western painting, in the present context. His questions such as ¡®how does
nature move?¡¯ and ¡®how does a painter capture the whole time-space?¡¯ are all
related to the various time-spaces which he came to describe as ¡®real
landscape.¡¯ From his first exhibition titled ¡°Chinese Landscape Painting¡±(Jongno
Gallery, 1996) to the recent one ¡°True-view Landscape¡±(Museum Hanbyeokwon,
2016), Kim has constantly referred his visual experience to the traditional Asian
way of painting. The true-view landscapes he painted in 2016 are composed of
condensed crystals of more unconventional time-spaces. These paintings acquire
a new modernity as the ¡®painting of today¡¯ without resorting to the category of
the Asian. But, how is it possible?
First,
the horizontal line which resolutely divides the picture plane is a result of the
artist¡¯s aesthetic judgment that he would split the sky, the sea, or the
time-space without detailed descriptions. The huge color planes created by a
horizontal line, without representing objects, is a human¡¯s attempt to extract
abstract visuality from nature which he sees in front of him. Those landscapes
of Jeju in his paintings, the scenes he saw on the beach are real places with
real names, such as Sanbangsan Mountain or Cheongryeongpo, but when colored in
Chinese ink on linen or hemp cloth, they show the ¡®whole¡¯ world through their
unique sense of time and space. Kim¡¯s recent works are all titled True-view Landscape (2106). The
landscapes in his paintings break away from the world of concrete objects and
use the composition in a more abstract way. The blue occupying almost half of
the painting is enough to show the commanding presence of the sea. The island
painted in Chinese ink on the picture plane exists independently, shaping its
own form with rhythmical lines. The sea, the island, the weeds, and the sky all
seem to be connected through the relation, through which air can enter and
leave. What we see in his paintings are, therefore, not thick materials, but
the sight of clear and transparent challenge which has let go of the human
desire to catch a stroke of moving nature.
Let us
turn our eye to Kim¡¯s another painting, almost half of which is covered in
black. Though the black seems to represent the night sea, the sky, or the empty
area makes it of little importance whether this place is in the daytime or at
night. The view above the sea is depicted in faint lines, and the black sea
painted in gradation leads the viewers to experience this place enshroud in
black as the auditory state of silence, as well. This square frame finished perfectionistically
expands the points, lines, planes and colors in the picture surface from the
features of the concrete place as the subject matter of painting to the
landscape of the universal world. Kim Hyunchul¡¯s
painting is grounded on an enlightened and well-trained mentality which is not
swayed by the storms of life. His is known for various episodes, such as having
experienced thousands of the states of the sea, moving along the shoreline, for
the purpose of watching seascape, and establishing his own form and style out
of the time and space he had seen during his stay in Jeju island, on the basis
of the refined techniques of Chinese traditional painting. All these tell us
that Geumreung Kim Hyunchul¡¯s
painting is all about the pursuit of the ¡®essence¡¯ that the painter finds out
himself by seeing nature with his own eyes. Before his beautiful and clean
paintings, the viewers have an experience in which their eyes and heart are
purified. The gaze of this painter who paints the relationship between the eye
and the heart reaches far toward the past time, as well as is very deep. The
landscapes which Gyeomjae Jeong Seon in the Joseon dynasty strived to capture
related to the methodology born in this background, which was absolutely
impossible to be explained by the single point perspective. The True-view Landscape in 2016 which
captures the whole landscape, including air, is in itself dignified.
Hyun, Seewon (Curator)