Junsang Yoo (Critic)

 

Kukjin Kang is an artist with many different activities. For the last decade or so, they have mostly been along the line of the experimental. He spent most of his 60s in experimenting the potential of art through various means including performance and happening arts having introduced himself on the stage in 1965 as a member of ‘Noncol coterie’, and participated in ‘Chungnyun jakka yeunlipjun’ in 1967, arguably the most interesting talking point in the art world that year. He has also recently expressed (therefore put on experiments) his interest in the fundamental conceptual elements of art. Until now, Kang, as it has been the case of most artists, started working professionally from the point of existential subjectivity. One argues so due to the thought that experimentality can directly be translated into self-examination. That said, an artist’s consciousness of existence comes out the bud as one tries to move beyond the established and aim strenuously towards more radical, innovative outcome. In other words, his motivation is his plan for overcome the conditions of reality.
Such point of reference has always been in his utmost interest. He has however realized that the entity of change and willingness cannot be so free from the social and historical influences. This is when he started suspecting that his agenda may be already involuntarily based on the on-going process of society and history.
And this particular thought of Kang is evident from his focus on fundamental structure and systematic approaches of painting. He thus approached art from the point of le travailleur so as to get a clearer view of how art in his own terms actually physically should be carried out and how he should personalize the outcome. And he did this by printmaking which requires an extensive control in order to manipulate the outcome as one wants, unlike painting for which the painter is directly accessible to the surface of outcomes themselves. That is to say, the subsistence and permanence of printmaking include as a precondition the ability to gain control over execution of dexterity which is also the internal source of structuring. Of course, this point of view applies not only to Modern printmaking, but also to what art faces in a particular era. It is only that Kang has attempted to understand the nature by trying a medium of metier. What his latest prints show is rather his personal sense of a time in history than the skill itself. By doing so, he is trying to stand at the viewpoint of the deed of painting, instead of trying to express things technically,

 

Junsang Yoo, Nov. 1978