Sowing Rice

This is the season when the farmers here in Korea plant their rice. First, the terraced fields are ploughed over by a tractor. Then, an irrigation system begins filling the fields with water, so they look like rectangular ponds. Like this:

Meanwhile, a field has been set aside as a ‘nursery’ for growing the rice shoots en masse:

As I write this blog, these shoots are being replanted in the nearby fields:

A specially designed tractor is employed with very thin wheels and a rotary feed system that precisely sows the rice bushels in neat rows. The work that once would have taken a whole village several days is now quite easily and rapidly achieved. Which is just as well, because young Koreans don’t want to be farmers anymore, and foreign labour is increasingly employed.

The Korean peninsula, which is over 70 percent mountains, is not an ideal landscape to grow rice.. Nevertheless rice - ‘Bap’ - is ingrained within the daily life and culture of Korea. It plays a key role in ceremonies and celebrations., such as at Chuseok, when a bowl of rice is traditionally left as an offering on an ancestor’s grave. Korean cuisine is built around rice, which has been a culinary staple since the Neolithic period. Koreanc will eat rice for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. This rice is different from other varieties in Southeast Asia, in that it is shorter grained and very sticky. It is also mild in flavor. At home, we have a rice maker called a Cuckoo which is programmed to speak and always makes perfect cooked rice:

Our Cuckoo rice maker. It talks!

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Watching the rice planting process going on in the fields around here has made me think once again about a metaphor that has seemed relevant in understanding a basic difference between Western and Eastern art traditions. In an essay I wrote about Chung Sang-Hwa (1932 -) for the catalog of his 2022 Retrospective at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul, I suggested that Chung’s painting invite analogies related to agriculture.  He ‘farms’ his surface:

Chung Sang-Hwa, Untitled 91-12-7, 1991, acrylic on canvas, 259.1 X 193.9cm. Courtesy Hyundai Gallery.

This metaphor also extends to another Korean artist I have just finished writing an essay about for a forthcoming exhibition at Hyundai Gallery in Seoul: Kim Guiline (1936 - 2021). I will do a post on Kim’ work specifically in the near future, but for now I want to suggest that here too, an analogy to farming is pertinent. This is an example of a typical work:

Kim Guiline, Inside, Outside, 1983, oil on canvas, 250 x 200 cm. Courtesy Hyundai Gallery

I don’t just mean that, literally, Chung and Kim’s surfaces visually bring to mind the straight rows of recently planted rice or the stubble intentionally left in a field after the harvest.  The metaphor goes deeper than simply appearance. Unlike Western artists who work their surfaces vertically, Chung and Kim both continue to work on theirs horizontally, as was traditionally the way before the impact of Western art was felt. In fact, one could argue (and here I am borrowing an insight of the art historian John Onians) that the characteristic posture of the European artist from the sixteenth century onward, in which the artist stands before an easel - known in Italian as a cavaletto and in french as a chavalet – a ‘horse’ – holding a brush in one hand and a palette in  the other, conjures chivalric and military metaphors of the knight brandishing a sword and shield. 

Onians suggest that this reflects at an unconscious level the new assertiveness and authority possessed by the artist in the Renaissance. But it could also go deeper than that and reflect a basic attitude to the world for the European artist in which the subject of representation is subdued by force - is ‘possessed’ or ‘captured’. This  relationship of violent mastery was also deepened as artists became urbanized and Europe industrialized, and the world of art was progressively distanced from the world of cultivating the land..

By contrast, in the Eastern artistic tradition such violence at the heart of art is absent. The artist sat on the floor above the surface upon which they plant their marks, and a world is not being subdued but rather cultivated. In so far as Korean artists of Chung and Kim’s generation grew up in a country that was  predominantly agricultural, the use of such an agrarian metaphor  for the practice of art seems a viable association even in the period of modern art. Both Chung and Kim aim at what could be called ‘harmonious regulation’. The surface  of their paintings is for them understood as a field that yields without exhausting its potential as part of a continuous cycle in which the artist’s movements correspond with those of their materials.  A painting surface is a zone between the earth below and the atmosphere above, where the two intermingle as part of a process instigated by the artist. So one could say that these artists’ surfaces are analogous to agricultural fields in the sense that they are places of planting, where the traces of systematic movement are sown.

 NOTE

John Onians observations can be found in his book European Art: A Neuroarthistory (Yale University Press, 2016)