Junsang Yoo (Critic)

 

My first experience with Kukjin Kang goes 30 years back when he formed the Noncol coterie group. The name of the group had come from a typical farming village situated in Hongjedong near Muhakjae which was just outside Seodaemun. The scene of the village was always calm and there were traditional grass-roofed houses and cottages sporadically distributed. There was a crematory site just adjacent to the village, which meant the yellow-soiled road traversing the village was a path for funeral procession with mournful melodies and flags. In lieu of all this, there also was a two-story house that Kang his aides from Hongik University, together as Noncol, used as workshop. As I recall now, the members were Youngsub Han, Taeshin Choi, Inhwan, Myochun Lee, and recently deceased Chanseung Jung. What the crafted in the house were later displayed at the foundation exhibition of Noncol in 1965, creating a new microrealm of art world.

 

Born in Jinju, Kang was a quiet man who would rather choose to marginally keep away from the center of heated conversations. At the time of the creation of the group, Kang spoke of his personal ethics; “What I explain are not the things exterior, objectively speaking, but those connoted inside infinite pool of thoughts. Digging into it and unearthing them is what my work is about.” This was when he was in his late 20s, and this remark shows that he was tilting towards existentialist, and neo-romantic expressionism, then arguably the most prevalent subject of art. As supported by standard term, Expressionism does not fall under the banner of a normative law due to its characteristic property that pursues inner spiritual rather than subjective form of understanding. Hence the law that it follows render somewhat clandestine, edged and personal expressions.

Kang described this way of understanding as ‘acceptance of things coming from my unique way of life’. It follows that European Expressionism was quite heavily based on the ethnic complex in the 20th century, mainly tried by the Germanic or Slavics of northern Europe. This trend mainly finds its source from the ethnic race’s feelings towards the oppression and forcible actions taken on them ? especially in the context of art history ? which bore human suffering and affliction. Kang’s philosophy in his work can therefore be thought as grown from similar seeds of willingness and apprehension.
His work in his mid-30s and late 40s can be bundled as an omnibus concerning the concept of ‘linearity’ or Garak series, which mainly consisted of numerous staccatoic-lines of brush stroke that filled the whole canvas. The particular mode of expression can be referred to Mark Tobey’s ‘all-over’. It was a type of drift growing from a sort of sequential art, part of which in the 50s showed Jackson Pollock’s sprinkling and scattering method. The theory on which it is supposedly based on was ‘the holistic’, a thought behind the method that the surface and spatial resources are more valuable raison d’etre than its constituents, be it the paint itself or expressions on the canvas. This then allows the growth of thoughts of Frank Stella and Donald Judd which claims that such way of working is not a deed of expression but inanimation as an existence.
If we were to take the sea as a whole entity, then the sole constituent of that is water, or more precisely the very essence of its chemical element. What we understand as sea is allegedly full of the elements. This however is not always constant with respect to its wholeness. There are rhythms to its movement and flow, sometimes violent and in others quite or mild. But the essence of what it is made of never changes. The very essence of what it consists of therefore happens to show different forms of existence. It follows that the composition or “the whole of it is established from independent individuals, but these elements follow the norm that characterizes it”. This regime of thought was led by Paul Cezanne. What he did was expression of the exact paradigm aforementioned, thereby differentiating the wholeness into multiple ramifications, allowing the whole consist only of elements of perpendicularity. This is to say that he, rather than recording what happened and what was drawn probed and retrieved the reason for existence of what he was dealing with. This particular conception is passed on to later artists, and whether or not Kang precisely shared it, they resemble each other. “Probing is to fumble for the real state”.
Kang’s thought behind his Garak series is based on the above, but his work looks rather like weaving on a loom in the absence of the warp threads. He characterized his own work as ‘repetition of act of no compensation’, which seems to remind of his ‘acceptance’ conception. Weaving fabric is made of the weft and the warp thread whereas the loom is the mechanism that composes them. Kang’s interest didn’t lie on the mechanism. Perhaps Kang and his work bore the philosophy of traditional person sitting in front of a loom to weave in horizontal and vertical warp threads that presented the existence of ‘act of no compensation’.
So, Kang is not an artist of our time who was baptized by the modern times but instead one who pursues painting taken as an entity that ‘exists’. Many artists asked questions so as to find out why and what to paint. Cezanne was the first to buck this flow and what is meant by the term ‘baptized’ is founding one’s philosophy on this specific thought. What Kang is after does not indicate illusions, but their locational condition of the surface and investigating the very nature of the spatiality. In other words, instead of asking formative questions about the canvas (or metaphorically the seawater) and its flatness, he is raising the self-awareness of the cognitive sense that cognizes the canvas. This is much like the mechanism of language in which there are numerous presumptions, most of which are accurate and comprehensible within a community. Kang, from the early 70s, produced such kinds of discourse having set on a totally different stance from before. His works upon the above thoughts were most made of strings, ropes, rocks, paperboards and wooden materials, which meant not many of them are preserved or well-preserved. I could however look at some of the catalogues concerning his footsteps.
What these findings remind me of is his natural predisposition as an artist to concentrate on a certain concrete concepts rather than producing in gross. I could associate this philosophical penchant with his outward behaviors and remarks ? tacit, perhaps overly thoughtful. His work could be classified by some as a conceptual art type. But in a broad sense his ethics in art world was at least partly shown in the form of performances. He thought that the source of a form of expression is predicated only on the pattern in which a cognitive sense operates, which is what is indicated by the term ‘form’ that could just mean in terms of superficial construct in lieu. How we cognize the form of some of pivotal scientific elements is to understand them in the form of symbols and universal languages. But the symbols for example are not the elements themselves. Therefore the symbol in Modern artists understanding supposedly coming from (post) Dadaism is a mere instrument to explain the ‘whole’. This also hopefully explains his logic behind performance arts he created and his repetitive linearity pattern.
Coming into the 80s, Kang got into the strides of printmaking and opened his own workshop for both teaching and production. This was also the time when he got what he most needed and craved; a person who fully understands his philosophy, Yangja Hwang, and when he was on the verge of displaying works at the very best active craftsmanship after many years of experimentations.

 

July 1995