필촉(筆觸): gesture
2025.11.01. - 12.05.
Preface
Jueweon Kim
“The atmosphere of Paris reinforces my usual thoughts. The world of art is not about academic rigor but about how to paint what [...] The silent dawn along the banks of the Seine is disturbed by the brushing wind through the leaves. Amid that music, I paint every morning.”
- Yim Jiksoon, “Summer in Paris” in The Village of Flowers and Sun – Compilation of Yim Jiksoon. Seoul: Kyungmi Munhwasa, 1980.
In 1973, artist Yim Jiksoon (任直淳, 1921-1996) found his sojourn in Paris and painted every morning. Staying at a six-story hotel in Montparnasse with a history of about two hundred years, Yim’s stay in Paris marked an important transition in his artistic practices.
During his stays, Montparnasse was known for its attraction of avant-garde artists such as L’Ecole de Paris. Artists such as Modigliani and Chagall, Picasso and Kandinsky, Gauguin and Matisse, as well as Apollinaire, Hemingway, and Stravinsky would gather here to debate art and new ideas, relentlessly engaging in unique aesthetic experiments without hesitation. Life and the street scenes of Montparnasse, where the sensibilities of the artists who gave birth to modern art still lingered, seem to have extremely stimulated Yim’s self-awareness as an artist. In his art compilation, The Village of Flowers and Sun (1980), he recollects that his life in Montparnasse compelled him to paint every morning and led him to ask himself ‘How do I devote myself to art in my entirety?’
His works on the streets of Paris, then the center of world art, and the landscape of classic French gardens such as Jardin du Luxembourg, or Chateau de Sceaux, as well as the still life or landscape in and outside of his hotel, testify to the profound impact of the artistic reflections and challenges that Yim faced during his sojourn.
It is well-established in the critical community that Yim Jiksoon helped form a significant lineage of figurative art in the history of modern Korean art. In particular, he has been referred to as a ‘painter of color’ for his use of bright, expressive, yet bold colors to paint landscapes, flowers, and women in a style reminiscent of Impressionism. His identity as a ‘painter of color’ can be found in two distinct periods of his career – one during his studies at the Nihon Bijutsu Gakkō (Japan Art School; 日本美術學校) in which he laid foundations of his painting practices after moving to Japan in 1936, and another in the bold brush strokes, a distinct sense of form, and sentimentally rich expressions in the works he produced to submit to National Exhibition after his return to Korea. It can be said about Yim that he gained acclaim more for his color expression than for his focus on form.
Yim’s works, which had previously focused on painting beautiful subjects or themes with lively sentiments in vibrant colors, took a shift in the mid to late 1970s toward an exploration of the vitality inherent in both colors and the subjects and themes. His nearly year-long stay in Paris and the solo exhibition there were extended to other international experiences, such as several solo exhibitions in Tokyo. This experience seems to have given him an opportunity to reflect on his distinct artistic disposition and approach to color, distinguished from the Impressionists of Europe or Japan.
“It was my lifelong passion to pursue a color that constantly changes in contact with light. Now, however, I am convinced that there is something more fundamental, more essential to color itself – an inherent quality of it that defies change. I am in pursuit of a more essential color, rather than a temporary color that nature presents to us. This is relevant to the transformation in me as an artist to paint away from the ‘fields’. To paint not under the sun but to contemplate the color from within and visualize it. To see objects not with the eyes but with the mind’s eye. Such strong impulses take me in front of the canvas these days.”
Yim Jiksoon (qtd. in Jang Myungsoo, “The Artist with a Hat in Front of a Girl.” Quarterly Art, no. 27, Fall 1983, p. 29)
“[...] To paint should not cease at a mere act of translating form into a color. It is an act of enlightening what beauty is and revealing the hidden truth in an object. This is the joy of the artist and ultimately of everyone.”
Yim Jiksoon, The Village of Flowers and Sun – Compilation of Yim Jiksoon. Seoul: Kyungmi Munhwasa, 1980.
In late 1976, Yim Jiksoon was hospitalized for about a month due to an acute health issue. This led him to stay away from his conventional practice of representing the transformation and illusion of color in the subject under the sun. In other words, he began to explore the ‘interiority’ or the essence of the subject rather than its surface. In his words, he sought to ‘turn from the visual truth to the emotional truth’. Rather than focusing on the external scale or form, he focused on the inherent system of the subject in bold insight and speculation. Once he systematized such a practice, his painting inclined to a more daring simplification and clarity, toward the bold intentional omission and the emphasis of essence, leaving realism and representation behind.
In this transition, in which he brings an aesthetic question of ‘internal system’ or ‘inner vitality’ to ordinary subjects of landscapes, flowers, or women, his stylistic choice of raw brush strokes bears a particular significance. The style that emphasizes ‘gestures’ (筆觸) as an expression of the interiority reveals the raw excitement, emotional resonance, focus, and empathy of an artist who faced the beauty and truth inherent in the subject for the first time. The simplified drawings rendered in a single medium – let it be charcoal, pencil, pen, or watercolor are appealing precisely because of their restraint.
Yim’s odyssey for artistic exploration that leads to the essence and interiority of both the subject and the color is vividly depicted throughout the later period of his career - from a single piece of drawing in his letter to Lee Wansuk (李完錫, 1915-1969), the founder of Cheonil Gallery (which marked the beginning of Gallery YEH), to his landscape, flowers, and women paintings of Gwangju, Gyeongju, Namhae, Mungyeong Saejae, Hangyeryeong, and Seoraksan Mountain.
The shift from the surface to the inner essence is easier said than done. To explore the interiority of the subject and the color, to reach the unfathomable depth of the fundamental structure of things, leaves an unmistakable mark on the canvas. Such a mark, in Yim’s artistic practices, can be best found in his ‘gestures’.