2002. 11. 15 - 11. 29

The Paintings of Kim Woong

Michael Walls - Art critic

The paintings of the New York City-based artist, Woong Kim, are characterized by several physical and psychological aspects which - in combination - effect a genuinely individual artistic sensibility, developed with both patience and perseverance during a period extending over three decades, since he left his native Korea at the age of twenty-five to "study and become an artist" in New York.

Perhaps the first aspect of Mr. Kim's paintings of recent years which strikes the viewers is their remarkably complex and compacted surface. This is the result of an enormously labor-intensive approach to painting in which he slowly layers oil paint and collage elements of fabric and paper, adding and removing, again and again - until a crust-like surface is achieved. All of his paintings have a dominant hue or a tightly orchestrated range of related, intertwining hues which produces a field that - at first glance - appears to be monochromatic [though this is more pronounced in the works of large scale - those having one or both dimensions of six feet or greater].

Throughout this field are situated numerous constructed, low-relief forms, the majority of which have a roughly circular or elliptical silhouette. Some of these are placed so early in the process of making an individual painting that they are all but totally submerged in the skin of oil paint, causing the viewer to feel that he might have suddenly developed X-ray vision. Inches away from one of these ghostly apparitions, however, may be a related form which is constructed of numerous small, torn fragments of a patterned, multicolored paper - made richer and more lively by tiny dabs of paint that mimic and jest with the palette and pattern of the college element.

For a period of time, he has been inserting an extremely subtle self-portrait into certain works: an altered oval representing his head or an oddly biomorphic shape which could be read as a three-quarter profile of his face, with an ear or the nose protruding from a gentle curve. He has spoken of working hard to render this imprint of the creator's presence to be as unobtrusive as possible, feeling that - if successful - this element increases the psychological richness of the completed work.

Among the first experiences, in early childhood, which began to shape the artist's visual acuity and his attraction to the subtle beauties of the physical world were ones involving both vertical and horizontal, manmade surfaces: the old, interior and exterior, clay walls, with their cracked, gently irregular surfaces and their "painterly", deep, earth colorations, and the jang pan, the traditional, oiled paper used to cover residential floors, which has both practical and aesthetic properties. He has spoken of being strongly attracted to something of such little consequence as the "welt" formed by the modest overlapping of two adjacent sheets of this ochre-colored paper and to the relationship between its hemmed edge and the wall of the room.

These early discoveries of form and function reappear now in his paintings - in the delicate outlines of torn strips of artists' canvas which crisscross to form a circular form resembling a mandala or a wheel, and in the exquisite ways in which he articulates the margins of his paintings [again, of particular beauty and variety in the larger works]. Notable are the shifts of color, working materials, direction of brush strokes, and related devices with which he pulls the viewer's eye away from the center of the work - across the topographically complex, nearly monochromatic expanses so that it might delight in the narrow borders of patterned colors or in his recently invoked motif of a [miniature] painting-within-a-painting, for example, the predominantly sand-colored, rectangular composition locked into the lower right corner of Interior Landscape with Disk (No. 1).

Mr. Kim recently remarked, with surprising candor, that he makes his paintings for himself - to live with and to please him. His principal criterion during the lengthy working process [which could be measured in months for most of his works on canvas] is that he is building a painting that he himself will not grow tired of, but rather a work that will continue to engage its creator's thinking and - in doing so - reveal new aspects of itself.

I have long felt that the most enigmatic elements of his paintings are the long, painted, straight or curved lines which seemingly rest upon the surface of his works. To writes that these lines "rest" on the surface is misleading, as it would be possible to see them as closely relating to tattoos or ceremonial scarifications on the flesh of a person - wedded to the surface physically, but - graphically - on top of. They glide with seeming autonomy across other compositional elements which, by dint of both greater scale and more complex structure [or even, in some cases, the presence of polychrome], should be expected to have pride of place. When I asked the artist what meaning they hold for him, he replied that he employs them primarily as perspective lines, to guide the viewer deeper into the painting. Then, unexpectedly, he added, "If they work, they don't have to have a specific meaning." ....and yet, their very presence and exact position within the composition as a whole are so precise. Certain rules seem to apply: in the large-scale paintings, these lines flirt with the margins of the painting, beginning [or ending] inches from an edge, but never actually touching. In the smaller or medium-scale works, however, they usually do engage one or more margins. As he continues to employ these odd, space-engendering devices, they grow more complex, with arcs intersecting to form a kind of scaffolding or latticework.

The presence and the considered placement of all daily "companions" complement an ordered existence, as well as being nurturing to his life as a painter. The symbiotic relationship between the exact environment in which his work slowly comes into existence and the drawings and paintings themselves always bring to my mind the black-and-white photographs I have seen of Piet Mondrian's last two studios, in London and in New York. Woong Kim's sensibility and that of the Dutch master have perhaps more dissimilarities than points of communion, but each gentleman learned well how to make of an artist's life an apparently seamless whole.