What is Korean About Water Droplets and Lines?
Recently, I've been into Korean modern art—namely, Korean Informel. It's all abstract, which makes it hard to have the "authentic" Korean themes curators love so much. But this abstraction is what makes it so fun, because I find Korean Informel to still have something very "Korean" about it. Historically, too, it's the first purely "Korean" movement - before this generation of artists, it was fairly common for Koreans to go to Japan for education to learn the Japanese canon of art. But these artists were the first to be taught by Korean teachers in a Korean art school, which makes it even more intriguing to me.
My pet peeve with "authentic" Korean artwork in American museums is that curators tend towards either extremely ancient artifacts (think pots, royal regalia), or extremely "Korean" art (think depictions of hanbok, cuisine). Considering there is not a lot of western literature regarding Korean contemporary art, let alone regarding the many other Asian countries besides Japan, I’m not quite sure that these curators can show “authentic” Asian culture through their own choices. I was happy to hear that Korean Informel artists were also against this depiction of what is Korean. To try to invoke a sense of patriotism in a completely destroyed nation, the government at the time was defining certain artifacts as Korean culture, which the artists found as bullshit. You can't distill a "culture" into just items that a group of people labeled as "important."
But at the same time, it's not like culture is completely irrelevant in these creators' works. It's also inaccurate to completely ignore the background of the artists in understanding their works, but I also think art curators take the extremely boring, easy way out of analyzing culture. Partly because they're not necessarily familiar with the culture on the work, and partly because western art history tends towards not covering Asian nations (except for Japan, which despite mass coverage, has still been done dirty—but that's an entirely separate article).
Even though Korean Informel looks superficially similar to American and European abstract modern art, the thought process is totally different. It's interesting because all three movements were in reactions to different mass traumas—Korean Informel was mostly in reaction to Korean division and the instability following it, as well as the rejection of Western and Japanese ideals placed on them by the government. American and European abstraction were mostly focused on WWII, as well as the rejection of art movements following WWI. So even though they started from similar events, they had completely different artistic reactions.
Kim Tschang-Yeul and Park Seo-Bo both began to erase the deep roots of their painful memories by the essence of repetition - the act of painting picture-perfect water drops about to rise off the canvas, the act of carving meaningless cursive into paint, erasing imperfectly, carving again. Over and over again, until a sense of nothingness remains in place of the Korean War, senseless deaths, starving wives and kids. This is a very different philosophy from the European modern artists, who made works that literally depicted the pain that they suffered either in the war or in the aftermath of the war. Think Guernica, or Fautrier’s Otages.
“In New York I felt estranged by the materialism of society and by the art that embodied this society.”
American artists were mostly fairly busy with Pop Art, which was so tonally different from Korean Informel that Kim Tschang-Yeul stated that "In New York I felt estranged by the materialism of society and by the art that embodied this society." Having gone to the Andy Warhol museum fairly recently, I can agree that the "I'm just having a good time" energy exuding from Warhol's works is not even remotely similar to the intensity of Korean Informel. Even their processes are the antithesis of each other; Warhol's most famous works used screen printing to easily enlarge a magazine photo and paint it in one go. Kim Tschang-Yeul, in contrast, was focused on the meticulousness of painting perfectly photorealistic water droplets on ever complicated backgrounds.
The act of repetition was born from Buddhist and Oriental philosophies, according to Park Seo-Bo, which can be found throughout both Kim Tschang-Yeul and Park Seo-Bo's works. Park Seo-Bo's works are a personal favorite of mine because when I first saw them, I had no idea what to think of them. But when I read into his works, I realized that they were all embedded with parts of his background, parts of which are due to Korean culture. In his interviews, he sounds just like my grandparents, from his tone to the way he explains his process and methods for his works. His use of the color black, he noted pridefully, is completely different from the "western" understanding of the color black as something flat. When you put your finger (figuratively) in the color of "western" black, your finger hits a wall. When you put your finger in his painted blacks, you enter an infinite space.
His most recent works are these lines going up and down the canvas, with wide empty rectangles disrupting the lines once or twice. What isn't clear from images is that these lines are actually small hills that point out towards the viewer, with the gaps being furrows that raised them to those peaks in the first place. The wide rectangles give our eyes a resting spot from the busy lines, although the lines give a sense of peace as well. Another element that images can't capture is time - as time passes through the day, the light hits the hills differently. The colors in the furrows between the hills go from vivid, neon colors to subdued shadows as the sun sets. The entire series is very peaceful and reminds me of those afternoons where all you do is watch the shadows from your window go across the room.
I don't think that Korean Informel is the Be All End All of what is Korean culture in art; I think that misses the point of their works in the first place, and besides, I'm not qualified to make those kinds of statements. What attracts me to these works is that they are different from the American expectations of presenting your identity and culture as something that is easily digestible to viewers. And the viewers tend to find easily digestible works pretty flat too. I think it says something that these artists are beginning to receive recognition for their works as well—just last year, Park Seo-Bo had an exhibition at a relatively famous art museum, the Guggenheim.
In general, I'd like to hear more about modern artwork across the world, because any new group of people will find a different approach to solving a problem, and in the modern approach to artmaking, there are many art practices to challenge. I think that is culture to me, the differences in approaches to things like artmaking, or literature, or even everyday life. I don't really have a solution in the end for what American museums should do to "combat" the flat versions of culture they depict in their exhibitions, but I'd hope they started with genuine interest in the painters rather than an interest in "authentic" Eastern aesthetics.