Sungrok Seo (Critic)
Monthly art magazine Wolgan Misul, June 1989

 

I feel certain weight on my shoulders on my way to an exhibition. It may in fact be more articulately described as ‘strangeness’. It is mostly difficult to get by any fresh changes: all the rectangular exhibition spaces, another rectangular canvas and materials spread over them and other same old cliches. Encountering such things is definitely strange enough to make me feel repelled, partly because of the underlying thought that they all don’t have to be as such. This could mean that the current norms and other measures built around them are heavily, and in most cases unnecessarily over-institutionalized; or alternatively, it could mean the level of general creativity has been on a decline. What I called cliche above is even dangerous in the sense that it may lead the public to develop wrongs eyes, having perceived such standardized, seemingly authoritative arts on canvas.

 

Then I was met with the art of Kukjin Kang. Frankly it felt rather nice to encounter his work for which he intended to unify the structural elements on flat surfaces. I could conceive and understand his willingness to try new things and introduce it through strenuous routines of experimentation, always up for new challenges. The exhibition was titled The Glow of History. One imagines that the work is to give a self-styled conviction on a comparison between the traditional and the Modern. What I am prepared to focus on is in fact not what the implication of such structures is, but rather the viewpoint via what he has constructed. His work is different in that the scene on the canvas is cut in half side by side on each of which there are certain allegorical forms and shapes to make a complete storyline on one single flat space, regardless of the possibility that they may look somewhat irrelevant to each other or sometimes appear to be associated in some ways.

The former can be explained from an altered perspective in the sense that pictures like the one with Buddha statue, geometrical and symmetrical shapes, and traditional folk craft images all together form an aura of the seemingly unrelated. In terms of Kang’s way of expression, they look almost as if he deliberately made and placed them to render the image crude, coarse, inferior, even awkwardly artless. The general composition and brush techniques can be described likewise. This is where he really sheds my expectation towards conventional painting. He succeeds in making the images look non-elegant and sublime in conventional respect, thereby rendering our thoughts anew about how we should or can perceive art.

The personal criticism towards eliticism, discontent with cliche two dimensional expressions and the ‘defiance by one’s own design’ is a valuable outcome that an artist can achieve.