Kim Guiline. Introduction to a Dansaekhwa Artist

Installation view of the exhibition Kim Guiline. Undeclared Fields at Hyundai Gallery, Seoul.

I recently wrote the catalogue essay for the current solo exhibition of the Korean artist Kim Guiline at Hyundai Gallery in Seoul (until July 14). Here is a version of part of the essay, in which I introduce Kim’s highly distinctive painting style.

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The Korean artist Kim Guiline was born in 1936 when Korea was a Japanese colony and in what became the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea.  Aged twelve,  escaped south shortly before the Korean War broke out. Initially, Kim studied French literature as an undergraduate in Seoul, and in 1961 he moved to Dijon in France to continue his studies with the intention of becoming a writer or poet. But he soon abandoned this goal and switched to Art History, before deciding to become a painter. In then studied art at the Beaux-Arts in Paris, going on to graduate from the École Nationale des Art Decoratifs.  Kim opted to live in Paris for the rest of his life  and he only returned to Korea for short visits. He died in Paris in 2021.  Nowadays, Kim associated with Korean Dansaekhwa (monochrome painting), and artists such as Park Seo-Bo, Chung Sang-Hwa, Yun Hyong-Keun, and Lee Ufan..

Changes in the viewing position adopted by us, the beholders, in relation to a typical painting by  Kim radically changes what we see.  From a distance, we perceive usually only a monochromatically colored rectangle, but as we move in closer we begin to make out rows of painted dots organized within rectangular zones that run parallel to the edges of the painting. At this position Kim’s paintings seem to become animated by the rhythm of these dots as we scan them across the surface. Close up, we see that the dots are slightly raised above the surface, which introduces a tactile dimension. Kim invites an active role for the body, one in which changes occur to cognitive readings via perceptual ones. Kim foregrounds the fact that a painting is an object that is not just seen head-on and in an isolated context (which is how we view an photographic reproduction like the ones in this catalog) but in real space is encountered from different angles and distances, and in the context of other paintings. These variously adopted viewing distances, performed in time, determine the relative authority of what is seen. In this sense, his work is  relational and ‘viewer-activated.’  

In the basic visual format adopted by Kim from the late 1970s until his death, the surface of the canvas or sheet of paper is divided with bilateral symmetry into rectangular sections. In works from the late 1970s and early 1980s a barely discernible drawn grid structure peeks through the coatings of the single color of paint with which he covered his work. As Kim’s work developed, he suppressed the visual evidence of this structuring linear grid, while he still retained it as an underlying regulating architecture. This structure is filled with rows of seed-like dots, about the size of a fingerprint, which Kim systematically painted within the rectangular areas. As time went by, and the grid lines disappeared, the dots sometimes take on slightly syncopated alignments, but they still essentially hold to the underlying gridded format. These serial dots are also built up into relief, producing a tactile dimension. This, like the rectangles which are aligned parallel to the edges of the canvas, counter any tendency to read spatial illusion into Kim’s paintings - for example, to see them as windows or doorways -  and encourages the perception of his paintings as literal objects with two-dimensional surfaces.

Inside, Outside, 1987–1988, oil on canvas, 240 x 160 cm.

Inside, Outside, 1987, oil on canvas, 200 x 250 cm

The element of raised relief in the dots introduces a level of haptic engagement that involves making a link between the eye and the hand through engaging two bodily functions: the tactile and the kinesthetic. The former brings direct physical contact, providing information about location, surface, vibration, and temperature. The accumulation of knowledge gained through touch is slower than that gained through visual perception, but it is more difficult to deceive. Touch confirms and demystifies. The kinesthetic, meanwhile,  is involved with knowledge about position, orientation, and force.  The haptic  brings into play greater awareness of body movements, of stimuli relating to bodily position, posture, and equilibrium that come from more immersive engagement. It helps build a stronger and more authentic awareness of a three dimensional and temporal world than the sense of sight. While vision facilitates a general conceptual knowledge through offering spatial detachment from what is perceived, and is therefore essential for the success of writing, touch verifies and brings conviction by providing specific knowledge revealed intimately through close contact. While a predominantly retinal response  to the world necessitates viewing the surface of a work of art from a certain distance, with tactile perception viewing at close range is necessary

Inside, Outside, 1985–1986, oil on canvas, 240 x 160 cm

The tactile dimension is also enhanced by the fact that Kim nearly always reduces his paintings to an all-over single colour which covers both the surface ‘ground’ and the dot ‘figures’ with the same hue. He applied multiple thin layers of a single oil colour to his canvas surfaces so as to produce a thick, mat, coating that is not flatly uniform but rather has a skin-like translucency. This monochromatic effect removes a salient visual sensation provided by the relationship normally set up between different colours within painted composition. As the painted dots and the background colour are more or less the same, the former are never clearly visually distinguishable from the ground, as they would be in conventional painting and writing spaces. But the use of monochrome could have significance well beyond simply the desire to enhance the material aspect of painting. As the visual dimension of light, colour is intrinsically shifting, a property produced by the retina rather than objects, which generates a pulsing, undulating sense of space. In being both material and sensual, color engenders visual pleasure and resists full incorporation into a code or sign-system. Colour is more subjective than line, playing on the emotions, and its opposition to form, and unstable relationship to coded systems, have made color a favoured vehicle for the artistic exploration of what cannot, or cannot yet, be encoded.

Inside, Outside, 2004, oil on canvas, 55 x 145 cm.

In both the west and in the literati scholar culture of East Asia, colour was traditionally deemed to be of less value than line, because of its sensuous indeterminacy. Modern western artists, however, initiated an exploration of the visual experience of luminous chromatic fields painted in oil, inviting a range of new responses and interpretations. Monochrome painting became a potential space within which to project emotions and imaginative scenarios, associations spanning extremes of human consciousness from despair to transcendence.

As Thomas McEvilley wrote: “throughout the twentieth century the broad one-colour field has functioned both as a symbol for the ground of being and as an invitation to be united with that ground”. In Kim’s case, the monochrome allowed him to encourage the perception of a painting as a simple unity. But formalist or metaphysical readings of this space are too limiting, and also limit Kim’s work to a western aesthetic framework.. To my mind, Kim’s paintings explore the concealed but close and evocative alliance between the codes associated with ‘painting space’ and  ‘writing space.’ His paintings insinuate into pictorial space the idea of a text inscribed on a page or some kind of vertically oriented monument or memorial.  But Kim doesn’t communicate anything like a clear linguistic message. His paintings obviously cannot be decoded or ‘read’ in a conventional sense. The dots are not words. They do not comprise legible sentences. Nor are they visual symbols. They are more like pure indexes of the sustained presence and methodical and intentional actions of the artist. Kim foregrounds the fact that, as Roland Barthes wrote, poetic writing is "a field of action, the definition of, and hope for, a possibility.”  

The elusive in-between space Kim Guiline creates reflects a consciousness inevitably involved in language, in segregations and the desire for control, but also one that is embodied and strove to undo difference and make intimate connections within a holistically experienced world. Kim’s aimed not to produce stable form but to serve as a conduit and go-between through which the essential energy pervading the world could be alluded to. He sited his work between the spaces of painting and writing,  and organized it to allude to a powerful but undeclared message redolent with the desire for the experience of timeless immersive equilibrium in the ever-changing world. Ultimately, Kim, a Korean in self-imposed exile in Paris, hoped to overcome in his work the alienation caused by the misunderstandings and prejudices that are an inevitable consequence of living in a language infested ‘Tower of Babel’.  Through his painting, he strove to reconnect with a more primordial experience of language, or of ‘writing’ As he himself declared, for him goal was always “the essence using nothing but accurate words.”

The catalogue, which includes my essay, ‘Kim Guiline. Undeclared Messages’.

NOTES.

See my book The Simple Truth. The Monochrome in Modern Art (London: Reaktion Books, 2020). Translated into Korean as 모노크롬, translated by Hee-kyung Hwang, Yeon-sim Jeong, supervised by Bu-kyung Son (Seoul: Ahn Graphics, 2020).  

Thomas McEvilley is quoted from ‘Seeking the Primal in Paint: The Monochrome Icon’, in G. Roger Denson ed. Capacity: History, the World and the Self in Contemporary Art and Criticism, (Amsterdam: OPA, 1996) page 87.

Roland Barthes is quoted from Writing Degree Zero [1953], trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York: Beacon Press, 1970), page 9.

All images courtesy of Hyundai Gallery website.

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)

‘Old Newness’

A few days ago I gave a talk at an International Conference on World Heritage held in Korea. The title of the conference was ‘World Heritage. Old Newness.’ The two-day conference included a video address from Stephan Doempke, the Chair of World Heritage Watch in which, amongst other things, he discussed the damage to cultural sites in Ukraine: since the war began on 24 February, UNESCO has verified damage to 168 sites.

My talk was in the section of the conference dedicated to ‘Artistic Interpretation of World Heritage and Creation of Future Heritage’, and was entitled ‘Cultural Heritage as ‘Memory Event’. The Case of Dansaekhwa’. I am posting the first part of the talk today in a slightly different version. I discuss the Korean art tendency known as ‘Dansaekhwa’ (One-colour-painting), which emerged in the Republic of Korea in the 1970s - I have written about  Dansaekhwa on more than one occasion in this blog and also published several essays on various aspects of the tendency, and there’s a chapter on it in my book ‘The Simple Truth. The Monochrome in Modern Art’ (2020). In this talk I discuss how these Korean artists’ works can be seen to transform the rigid experience of Past and Present into a more personal and inward experience of Then and Now.

First if all, here are examples of works by some Dansaekhwa artists:

Park Seo-Bo, Ecriture No, 28-73, 1873, Pencil and Oil on Canvas, 194.0 x 130.0 cm. Courtesy Kukje Gallery, Seoul.

Yun Hyong-keun. Umber, 1988-1989. Oil on linen, 205 x 333.5 cm. Courtesy of Yun Seong-ryeol and PKM Gallery, Seoul

Chung Sang-Hwa (1932-), Untitled 75-10, 1975, acrylic on canvas, 161x130cm. Courtesy Hyundai Gallery, Seoul.

Installation shot of works by Lee Ufan from the 1970s at Kukje Gallery, Seoul.

 ‘Cultural Heritage as ‘Memory Event. The Case of Dansaekhwa.’

By ‘memory event’ I mean a recollection of a specific occurrence which includes vivid details for the one doing the recollecting. It implies a ‘momentary’ sense of time, a temporal experience in which the linear chain between before and after is broken, and a moment drops out of its historical connection with other moments and gets a significance of its own. A ‘memory event’ overcomes the sterile binary of ‘past’ and ‘present’, substituting instead the potential for synthesis.  One re-imagines the experience of history as something partially freed from linear order and objective causal succession.  The Past and Present become the ‘Then’ and ‘Now’, a more personal and less rigid relationship to time.

The term ‘memory event’ fits very well the relationship to history evident in  Dansaekhwa artists’ works. They blended an interest in Western modern art with what they consider important aspects of their own indigenous culture that are conducive to expression through monochromatic painting. In particular, they emphasize the tangible -  the physical and sometimes laboriously repetitious working of a painting’s surface - and they engage more than the sense of sight by including touch and movement as part of the encounter.  Dansaekhwa artists were motivated by the desire to unite or bring into alignment their bodies and their work in order to bridge the gap between the mental and the physical, the inside and outside. For them, a painting becomes as a living intermediary between the self and the world.   

The cultural background to their intention  is the artists’ attachment to pre-modern, pre-Western cultural ideals, which they sought ways to re-imagine  for modern day Korea.  This was possible because of the awareness of history as the perpetual coming into existence, developing, decaying and going out of existence of all things. Rather than the Western idea of progress, their relationship to time was more characteristic of  what has been called the East Asian “‘Tao’ of history “, a relationship with which Dansaekhwa artists were intuitively associated. This meant attuning to   alternation:  to repeated occurrences in   space and time and involved bringing together ideas and things across time and place. It characterized relationships to the past in terms of what is meaningful from the perspective of the individual constructing the connection in the present. In this temporal model, time is experienced as non-linear, dissolving, diaphanous, and ephemeral.  It is something that can only be perceived, measured and remembered through an individual’s actions. As a result, history is conceptualized as a situation with potential in the present, something to be used to advantage in the now.

It seems evident that the artists associated with Dansaekhwa possessed a still graspable connection to the forms of social life in which the traditional, pre-industrial, experience of time  was grounded. They were immersed in a deep and pervasive background culture that permitted them to envisage a different relationship to history from Western artists, who were trapped within linear time. They lived within the “Tao’ of History’, and  hoped to give material expression to a vision of the future of modern Korea that conjoined Western influences with the appreciation of the continued validity of their inherited traditions, which were understood not as tokens buried within immobile tradition but as renewable resources.  However, the moment in the development of Korea in which Dansasekhwa  existed, one when it was possible to articulate an ‘unofficial’, personal, but socially liberating relationship to the past -  to see  the Then of pre-modern Korea  in the Now of modern Korea  -  has probably passed. The ‘memory events’ of young Koreans are no longer fed by these pre-modern, pre-westernization springs. They are much more deeply buried.