30 Years: Passages

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Kim Jae Do (Art Critic)

 About 30 years ago, a building that would later be known as the last national pavilion was built in Venice Biennale Giardini in 1995. The establishment of Pavilion Corea, the national pavilion that represents South Korea, was a great achievement following the nation’s entrance to the 42nd Biennale in 1986. The year 1995 played a significant role not only for the Venice Biennale but for the South Korean art scene as well. For the Biennale, marking its centennial anniversary, it was when they attempted to rectify its bureaucratic, Eurocentric, and closed characteristics that were subject to constant criticism. As part of the effort, the Biennale nominated Jean Clair, then director of the Picasso Museum in Paris and the first ever foreign curator as their artistic director, and built a national pavilion for an Asian country for an active and aggressive expansion into the global art scene. For South Korea, 1995 was a year of achievement where various projects and events were taking place across the areas of politics, economy, and culture as part of globalization. Amidst such global movements, the establishment of the Korean Pavilion meant a channel through which Korean art could be introduced to the global audience, and the launch of the Gwangju Biennale took up the opposite role of importing foreign art into the Korean scene.

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 The first exhibition at the Korean pavilion (46th Venice Biennale, 1995) comprised works of Kwak Hoon (b. 1941), Kim In Kyum (1945~2018), Yun Hyong-Keun (1928~2007), and Soocheon Jheon (1947~2018). With about 30 years of temporal and critical distance, it would seem timely to examine the struggles of the artists of the time. This is particularly so considering how their artistic journey was placed amidst the enthusiasm to communicate with the global art scene, the expansionary gesture of the Venice Biennale (a quintessentially Western product), and the artists’ dilemma of keeping their unique Korean identity while converging with universal art. The exhibition 30 Years: Passages assumes a form of omnibus that looks back on the past 30 years of Korean art and into its future by revisiting the works of Kwak Hoon and Kim In Kyum, who were the representative artists of the first exhibition at the Korean Pavilion , and Nam June Paik, whose contribution to the establishment of the pavilion is well-known. The spatiotemporal sense of the word ‘passage’ converges in the present exhibition, where the temporal passage that connects the past 30 years and now, and the spatial passage that allows exchanges between the local and the global, individual works with the audience, are connected or disconnected throughout the three floors of the exhibition space.

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Passage 1

  Nam June Paik (1932-2006), whose artistic foundation was laid in Germany and the United States, became a central figure that connected Korean and global art in the 1980s. As we saw in Good Morning, Mr. Orwell (1984), a transnational satellite project that connected Seoul, New York, Paris, and Tokyo, the central idea of his works was to construct a united network through what he called an ‘electronic superhighway’ which transcends physical, psychological, and emotional boundaries such as the national, ethnic, and cultural constraints. He won the Golden Lion Award in 1993 for his exhibition Nam June Paik: Electronic Superhighway – From Venice to Ulaanbaatar at the German pavilion, pronouncing his transnational practices. In this sense, Paik’s attempt at overthrowing the conventional artistic grammar in both content and form, elevating the mass medium of television into the realm of art and pursuing reciprocal communication by converting it into an active and positive medium, can be said to have provided a ‘superhighway’ for Korean artists whose artistic realm and concepts would eventually transgress national boundaries.

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  This exhibition presents textual and drawing archives along with exhibition brochures, photography, and prints that serve as a passage to remembering the artist and entering his works. Included is a rare flyer for Paik’s first solo exhibition Exposition of Music-Electronic Television (Galerie Parnass, Wuppertal, 1963), printed on the size-reduced version of Kyunghyang Newspaper. The flyer is a passage to his philosophy of art that identified art and information as one and to his thoughts that valued media as a form of press and journalism. These archives function as a source of reflection on Nam June Paik’s thoughts and artistic actions. In particular, the diverse types of analog materials such as drawings or texts will become a medium through which we enter the era and art from Paik’s time who earned the nicknames of ‘video art pioneer’, ‘avant-garde musician’, or ‘performance artist’ through his association with flashy technology and a series of electronic images.

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Passage 2

  Kwak Hoon, who moved to the United States in 1975 and has since been moving back and forth between Korea and the States, exhibited the installation performance using outdoor space Kalpa/Sound, What Marco Polo Left Behind at the first show in the Korean Pavilion in 1995. The work includes a long queue of potteries made in Korean kiln, hanging on a rope tied to the wooden structure like a wind instrument, and 20 Buddhist nuns sitting in a row next to the pottery connected to each other with bamboo tubes, orchestrated with Kim Young-dong’s daegeum (Korean flute) performance. The pottery objet, the sound of the flute, and the bodies of the nuns become a passage connecting each other, resonating beyond the land on which the work is installed and into the sky, the universe, and the mind of the audience. Kalpa, translated roughly as aeon, is a unit of time that is the longest and most eternal and refers to the limitlessness of time. In kalpa, time is more associated with eternity and holiness than its linearity. On the other hand, sound is a physical property with a strong sense of presence and can only be sensed when the sensory agent is present at the right time and place of the occurrence of time. The potteries connect the contrasting senses of Kalpa and sound, anchoring one end of an uncountable, imperceptible, and inexplainable aeon of time and the end of the sound that resonates at the installation space. These are organically connected to create a passage between heaven and earth, the world and humans, the Earth and the universe, life and death, and body and spirit.

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  Such a journey that transgresses linear time and physical constraints to reach a spirituality seems to continue in Kwak’s works ranging from Tea Bowl, Incantations, Kalpa, Chi series and to the most recent Halaayt (Inuit for the divine advent) series. These series feature a transcendental characteristic that moves beyond the material substance of the work or the identity of the artist through different mediums such as installation, performance, paintings that oscillate between abstract and figurative, etc. Kalpa/Sound, the performance installation work featured at the Korean pavilion at the Venice Biennale was also made into a painting that draws a form that reminds the audience of the potteries and the wooden structure, showing the experimental nature of the artist who attempts different artistic forms in conveying a singular concept. We find such a tendency to use different mediums for one concept in his Tea Bowl series where we find the representation of teapot as a painting, drawing series, large installations made from the drawing series, or as ceramic objets. Sipping the tea in the tea bowls leads the audience into the holy realm, much like how the ‘divine advent’ that the ancient people confronted while whale hunting led their everyday hunting into the realm of sublime and divine. In this exhibition, we are faced with the spiritual passage that the artist has walked and will walk through, by exhibiting the drawing and painting works corresponding to different series works that the artist consistently presented to us. It brings us back to the title of his poetry compilation published early this year, to the passage that the artist, who is a “son of the primitive”, sets his foot on the ground, head high, arms freely stretched out between land and sky, Haladhhas opened for us with multiple, powerful strokes.

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Passage 3

  Kim In Kyum’s works can be aptly summarized with the keywords of ‘space’, ‘thought’, and ‘spirituality’. Following one of the earliest works, Revelational Space, the series of Emptiness, Project, and Space-Less all show his obsession with the concepts of ‘space’ and ‘thought’. Project 21- Natural Net which the artist exhibited at the Korean pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1995 is a site-specific installation that reflects the spatial character of the circular exhibition space of the national pavilion. This work is conceptually connected to Project – The Walls of Thought which filled the entire space of Arko Art Center (formerly known as the Korean Culture and Art Foundation, Art Center, Seoul) with rusty steel structure to turn it into a field of thoughts. The circular structure of the exhibition space at the Korean pavilion is connected to the second floor with a spiral staircase at the center. The outer wall surrounded by glass leaves the space fully exposed to natural light, posing a great challenge to the artist who is used to the completely different white cube exhibition space. The artist implemented acrylic board plates and water that responds well to the natural light instead of his signature materials of bronze, stones, or wood. This allowed the artist to invite the special circumstance of the exhibition space as part of his works. Surrounding the spiral staircase with translucent acrylic boards in blue-violet and placing transparent acrylic structures filled with water and an air pump, Project 21 – Natural Net creates a dynamic space that shines differently according to the weather and the change in natural light at Giardini, Venice. The visitors, following the spiral staircase, will meet themselves on computer screens, captured in the security footage through cameras on the first floor. The communication between the visitors and the high-tech devices, video and sound, natural water and artificial structure, resonates with the theme of the 46th Venice Biennale of ‘Identity and Alterity’.

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  The sense of space and aesthetics that the layers of translucent acrylic boards create foretells the advent of sculpture and painting works of the Space-less series that blurs the distinction between two-dimension and three-dimension. Answering the invitation to the Centre Pompidou residency program in 1996, the artist began using paper as his main material during his stay in Paris. The relatively easy plasticity of paper provided an opportunity to explore various formal possibilities and gave birth to drawing works that employed squeeze, sponge and Korean ink, and Western inks. The reasons for his use of squeeze in lieu of conventional brushes can be found in the layers of wide squeeze surfaces that allowed the artist to expand his original interests through the unique form and spatiality of the squeeze. As such, the artist’s squeeze painting works serve as a passage connecting the works before and after his Paris stay, and the realization and interpretation of the three-dimension via two-dimension results in calling the sculptures of the Space-Less series ‘Image-Sculpture’. In particular, we may note that the artist used the title Dessin de Sculpture for his drawings and paper works in the mid-1990s. In French grammar, de carries a sense of apposition, meaning that Dessin de Sculpture can be understood as dessin that is sculpture or sculpture that is dessin. From this point onward, drawing and sculpting became one to the artist. In this exhibition, we can examine the essence that penetrates the artistic world of Kim In Kyum with the video filmed at the Korean pavilion exhibition in 1995, the Dessin de Sculpture series produced since he started staying in Paris in 1996, and the sculptures that sought to realize the three-dimension through two-dimension.