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.

‘Some Books’. An Exhibition

Me with works from my current exhibition in Seoul.

In my solo exhibition at Song Art Gallery in Seoul I show mostly what I call my ‘Book-Paintings’. These are based on the covers and title pages of real books. But unlike the original sources, the text is painted almost the same colour as the ground and is built up in painted layers to produce a relief effect. Both the content (the sources) and the perceptual experience of the form (colour, texture, etc.) are inextricably connected elements of an encounter with the paintings,, but in today’s post I focus on the content.

Here are some examples:

Three ‘Book Paintings’ Left to right: ‘Eliot. The Waste Land’ (1972)’, ‘Rilke. Duineser Elegien (1923)’, and ‘Camus, La Peste (1947)’. All are from 2023, acrylic on canvas, and 53 x 41cm

A side view of ‘Camus, La Peste (19470). The title of this novel translates into English as ‘The Plague.’ I made it as a kind of memorial to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Left to right: ‘Nietzsche, Zarathustra (1943)’ and ‘Nietzsche, Zarathustra (1950)’. Both works are from 2012, acrylic on canvas, and 120 x 160cm.

The source books for the paintings were all written by Western thinkers and writers of the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century: the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, the psychologists Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, the poets T.S. Eliot and Rainer Maria Rilke, and the writer Albert Camus. A triptych of gold ‘Book-Paintings’ evokes the Western humanist tradition from which these thinkers and writers come, and in this case I left out the texts that supply the name of the author and publisher so as to focus attention on the evocative titles: ‘Civilization in the West’, ‘Revolutionary Change’, ‘The Idea of the Humanities.’

‘The West’, 2018-2023, gold acylic on canvas, triptych: 41x32cm each panel.

‘Freud. Die Zukunft einer Illusion (1928),’ 2022, acrylic on canvas, 45 x 38cm

Installation view. The ‘Nietzsche’ paintings on the left, and ‘Freud’ on the right.

I began making the ‘Book Paintings’ in the late 1990s because I wanted to introduce a historical dimension to my work as an artist but in an unorthodox way. This desire was motivated by the prosaic fact that my first academic studies were in history (I have a BA in Modern History from Oxford University), and so making paintings like these was a way to link areas of interest and expertise. But the series also arose from my belief that painting is an excellent medium through which to communicate historical consciousness. That is, the complex relationship between the past, present, and future. 

When I started making ‘Book Paintings’ it wasn’t my intention to use them to celebrate aspects of Western culture, but that’s how the project has ended up, especially when seen within the context of South Korea, the country where I’ve lived since 2010.

But it’s definitely not a ‘politically correct’ time to engage in such a celebration, especially not for a straight white middle-class British male like me to do so. This is an Age of Correction, in the sense that the traditional Western elites are being forced into often serial acts of mea culpa. But living in South Korea has allowed me to stand back from the society from which I come and to see it a little differently, and perhaps more clearly. Especially, living near the DMZ for ten years, within sight of North Korea, has given me a much greater sense of what is valuable within Western culture and therefore needs celebrating, protecting, and nurturing, not just deconstructing and denigrating. For in many ways, the Republic of Korea is a ‘poster child’ for the benefits of embracing Western culture, and specifically, the variety espoused by the United States, which is closely associated with consumer capitalism.   And while South Korea is very far from being perfect – it is clearly rife with systemic vices, both imported and indigenous - it is obviously an infinitely preferable place to live than the grotesquely deformed nation known as the Democratic People’s Republic, which lies on the other side of the DMZ. This difference between the two contemporary Koreas is largely because of South Korea’s successful adoption and adaption of cultural values associated with liberal secular humanism and North Korea’s rejection of this path.

But my point stretches further than just the Korean peninsula. The current war in Ukraine is further evidence of how fragile the positive values associated with Western culture are, and how they need vigorous defense. And, although it’s certainly contentious to say so, it seems to me a similar confrontation is occurring now in Israel/Palestine, but alas it is also one that shows just how easily the Western values worth celebrating get perverted by unscrupulous leaders.

NOTES

The exhibition ‘Some Books’, runs until January 5, 2004.

Song Art Gallery’s website is: www.songartgallery.co.kr