Sublime echo of black Korean Ink
November 16- November 30, 2001
"Painting is to fathom material phenomena and thus to find out the Genuine in it....Form means that it makes its spirit and the genuine means that its nature is thriving. Every spirit passes on the beauty and leaves out the form and thus the material gets deflated."
-Hyunho <Bifaji>
Lee, Ki-Young's painting is compound not only in that his flower is a medium where reality and ideality meet each other but also in that the concreteness of the subject matter which is flower and the abstraction of black margin combine together. In his work, there is harmonious coexistence between these contrary elements such as stillness and expressionistic sensibility, flatness, and depth, dryness and dampness, and so on.
It is, in a sense, the painting of the relativistic sense oh value where disorder and order, and chance and inevitability coexist. Just as John Cage who writes music based on 'Aesthetics of chance' highlights silence between sounds rather than sounds themselves as a major element in music, Lee Ki-Young deconstructs the positive and the negative in his canvas by reversal of values of figure and background.
For this painting of chance, the artist applies the method of dry mural painting. He plasters Korean papers with slaked lime three or four times before painting. Through this, he can form the background which is able to keep moisture from moving and to hold more particles of Korean ink by lessening sensitive absorption capacity of Korean paper.
His method which seems similar with preparation work in frescos or mural painting should be considered as a meaningful attempt to interpret the traditional methods of Oriental paintings newly. In the 15th or16th century western, only natural pigments were believed appropriate for frescos, and thus the number of colours was limited. But those constraints of pigment conversely developed various methods of Renaissance fresco. Similarly, it is not easy to express the effect of modern color painting of while sticking to Korean ink which is still limited even through it has all colors.
For this reason, Lee Ki-young's painting could be called as thin 'fresco buono(fresco of white stucco)' of Oriental painting. Here what the artist focuses on is the mutual relationship between water and Korean ink(muk). Both Korean ink and fresco are unique in that their pigments are not water soluble. The particles of muk float in water for some time and then adhere to the background later, which leaves out certain figures and stains of muk.
In this way, the artist tries to overcome the canvas of muk which easily becomes monotonous with the help of the expressionistic effect of water. He paints with muk and then wipes out some parts which have not been adhered yet so as to leave out their stains. The resulted figures of these repeated processes are both intentional and accidental, sp that it gives a certain depth in his work.
In his recent work, he moves from paintings of stillness to that of movement through accurate and delicate use of water. While his former work was very existential by focusing on essence and reality, his new work is more about creation and formation by maximizing the effect of the aura of essence or reality. Through delicate tension both between the idea of line in Oriental painting and that of color field in Western painting, and between subjects and background, the artist attempts to overcome the difference of the outlooks on the world between the western and the eastern.
In this way, his new work expresses the flows of echoes, rhythms,, and consonance of the canvas. That is, he researches out for 'full animation of spirit' which is the movement of echo of spirit. His work seems to be felt not visually but rather spiritually since it is likely to come out from within the mind. Again, it is just like sound sensed in the mind. Thus, spiritual consonance of full liveliness and echoes of life lead us to experience of synesthesia of the visual and the auditory.
Some of his recent works maximize the effect of echoes and consonance by emphasizing the afterimages of also almost erased figures.
They are paintings where visual images become auditory shouts or paintings where nothing has been done but still everything has been done or paintings aiming for nothingness or paintings where the background becomes figures and vice versa. They also give the same feeling when we hear shouts of existence reverberating within aged mural paintings.
And his action of erasing figures reminds of Narcissus in Greek Myth. Narcissus jumps into the water when he sees the reflection if his face onto the water, that is, the realistic illusion. For his reflected face is more immediate than his actual one. Since Godard says "Art is not the reflection of the reality but the reality of the reflection", so what Narcissus sees is the very reality of the reflection. And the reason of his jumping into the water is that he attempts to get rid of illusion of the immediate limit, so to speak, to embrace the abstract and transcendant self.
Indeed, in Lee Ki-Young's work, the reality and the illusion intersect. All paintings are conceptual. For even in case of representing objects very realistically, the real objects are not there in paintings, but only the artist's idea about them are left out there. Thus all paintings are abstract. The gigantic flower form in the middle of the canvas not only looks very religious and erotic but also takes a role of a medium which elevates spirit and emotion behind real objects.
For this reason, his painting is not the phonogram of a physical object but the ideogram of the absolute idea it is not the painting painted on the ground, but one worked on the water or one that makes us regard for a long time not only its surface(the front view) but its abyss(the distant view). And it is not only the reflection f the reality on the surface but also Lee, Ki-young's self-image or his narcissism abstracted on to the water.
Lee. Ken-Shu (Art Critic/Chief Editor of Wolganmisool)