AN IMAGE OF A BLUE IDEAL LAND

A COMPROMISE BETWEEN AUTOMATISM AND MONOCHROME PAINTING

With the end of the 2nd World War, Clement Greenberg(1909-94), a representative art critic of the Abstract Expressionism that has been developed around New York, USA, once has declared that a key property of modernist painting is flatness, as illustrated in his essay 'Modernist Painting, 1960', "Flatness alone was unique and exclusive to Modernist painting. Flatness, twodimensionality, was the only condition painting shared with no other art, and so Modernist painting oriented itself to flatness as it did to nothing else."

 

What 'modern painting wishes to return to flatness' cannot but be a mere revolt from the standpoint of painting's history or essence. For it is a remark that extremely destroys a long history of art having begun with the aerial perspective created by Leonardo da Vinci(1452-1519) in the Renaissance, and having led to the persistent use of illusion and trompe l'oeil technique in the screen.

 

Such a "flatness" appears as a character of Suh Kyoung-Ja's paintings. She uses the acrylic paints. They can be used with water like the watercolor paints, which is a proper material for the representation of various sentiment. It is also seen as having an adequate property for the actualization of 'flatness', one of the characteristics of the Abstract Expressionism. It eventually has made possible for both a natural representation of artist's inner world and a positive revelation of the material's physicality.

 

The way that Suh Kyoung-Ja loos inside her inner world is based upon meditation. <Meditation> series having been produced in recent times make us read such an aspect. She makes her artworks very quickly. Having been fascinated with Oriental Zen, Peter Voulkos(1924-2002), a modern ceramic artist, once has trained himself and his students persistently to make a vessel within two minutes. It is known that he, through that process, has experienced a world free from all thoughts. He has shaken off the ideas generally cherished by the artists who wish to make which forms or paint which glazes. He only has left his mind and hands in his action of making.

 

The objects in <Meditation> series of this time are widely scattered on the canvas, and the space that forms the upper part occupy is wider than that of the lower part is a kind of inversion like a reverse perspective. The blue-colored tree's trunk occupying the upper space of the greyish background dominates the whole atmosphere of the work. Furthermore, the green color painted on the drawing of a spiral is remained as a trace that is performed in the state of empty mind, and the vertical and horizontal lines with minute strokes are swaying as small waves of the quiet sea.

 

It is very impressive that the whole hue of her work is changing into the mono-chromatic trend. The objects appeared in the previous works were very figurative in their shapes, but now such a trend is gradually disappearing. Her mono-chromatic trend intend to blue color. As if a child's heartfelt homeland is a blue world. The color is the representative of an ideal land. Like the shape of a tree's thick and straight trunk, her yearning for an ideal land is so frank and strong. Although she displays dark blue colors with the brush-tip strokes along the trunk's sides in order to express the dim shadow of a tree's trunk, which seems to be irrelevant to the perspective. Rather it would be a means for embossing the image of an ideal land through blue colors.

 

Expressed the appearance of that side beyond her conscious world, the work's background dominated by the grey color, an achromatic color, is very wide. Even though we come to read the tranquil stream of her consciousness from the infrequent linear drawings depicted horizontally in its partial space, which never sways her un- or sub-consciousness. There is also a change in the outlines of other object. That is the outline of a tree's trunk is very refined, whereas the outline of other objects is rough as well as dull. This change makes me associate with 'sabi' that is remarked by the Japanese artists when they apply Zen to art. Lines or forms depicted in the state of an empty mind, which must not maintain only the naturalness. A proper coexistence of both elaborateness and unskill, sharpness and dullness, which is the world of very 'sabi'. I see it adequate to mention the outline of those object's forms depicted by her from that point of view.

 

The world of Suh Kyoung-Ja's painting is very unique. In the paintings by her begun as a printing artist, it would be a natural phenomenon to look at the printing techniques intermittently. She has pointed to represent her own inner images without regard to whether it were a printing or a painting, it is a noteworthy thing that the above expression methods are very deeply connected with those of the Abstract Expressionism. Sometimes there is a work that has digested the technique of the Action painting, and sometimes there is a work that has been deeply fascinated by automatism. But now what she has displayed a compromising style of mono-chrome and automatism techniques is another characteristic of her paintings.

 

 

August 2005

CHOI, Byung-Kil

(Ph. D. Professor of Wonkwang Univ.)