A Painting Capturing the Whole Landscape - Hyun, Seewon (2016.12.15)



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)


 

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