‘Some Books’. An Exhibition
It’s definitely not a ‘politically correct’ time to engage in a celebration of Western culture, especially not for a straight white middle-class British male like me to do so. 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.
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