A Time When Painting and Life Dance_Exhibition of Artists of Chongkundang Yesuljisang
A Time When Painting and Life Dance
Kim Noam
Painting heads towards a free world. It moves towards a world that it freely chooses and creates. When viewed from a distance, this movement, which involves intense hard work and passion, appears as dancing. It is a dance that crosses through time and space and images. Painting imitates God's dance performance. The dance of the universe follows the providence of the world, which gives visual pleasure as well as freedom that transcends life and death.
Through experiences of unknown territory and marvelous experiences surrounding subtle or mysterious events, and through illusions that form and disappear in the process, we are drawn to a new dimension. What can we gain through traditional and typical paintings in the era of digital images and AI?
Painting in Korean contemporary art has continued to change and expand. Launched in 2012, the Chongkundang Yesuljisang has supported and encouraged Korean painters. Artists have deconstructed and reconstructed the concepts and forms of contemporary painting in various directions, raising their significance to a higher level. Through the paintings of the invited fifteen past awardees of Chongkundang Yesuljisang, we can confirm that the perspective on painting has changed in an expanded sense. In the artists' paintings, drawings, objets, collages, and assemblages are combined. At the same time, through the physical acts, how the complex and delicate forms and expressions that condense and expand have been operating and changing within painting is shown. Going deeper into painting means moving further away from the ordinary of everyday life and breaking away from the universal values that people agree on. To the extent that we create a new world within ourselves, we escape from ordinary life. We temporarily distance ourselves from the everyday world and social reality. Using painting as a channel, we secede from existing customs and prejudices, whether in a good or bad sense.
Poet Kim Kwang-Kyu said in his essay on a poem, ‘Language is an insufficient clothing of sound.’ However, this does not mean that paintings and painterly images make up for the deficiency of insufficient language. This means that it gives us an opportunity to turn our attention to an unexplored field beyond the dimension of what can be filled or emptied. It means that one becomes possessed by something at some point, rather than making a pursuit led by one's will. At that moment, we become attired in clothes that cannot be defined in our language.
The aesthetic universality we recognize in painting does not mean universality of meaning, but universality at the level of existence. Here, the dimension of existence is beyond the dimension of the logic of language and concepts, and it means something that is revealed in the relationship of necessity and coincidence through the life (history) of the artist and the work. This includes a world view, a view of life, or a view of art in a broad sense. Therefore, it is not a matter of coming into a mutual agreement upon the convergence of art historical or aesthetic conclusions, themes, or meanings from each artist or audience. The works of artists invited to this exhibition also do not deviate from this context. In painting, the perspective and attitude toward the aesthetic dimension of painting that we seek can fly far beyond the goals, meanings, and actions set by the artist, crossing over into another realm. The spectator can experience as much freedom the artists enjoy in front of the canvas, or even more. Like Giacometti's experience of descending to the edge of gravity or Brancusi's experience of ascending to the top of the sky.
Through Walter Benjamin's childhood experience of walking through the dark alleys of Berlin as the dusky light of the sunset descends. We have experienced secret and mysterious visions and fantasies through experiences similar to Benjamin's. Even though the specific conditions experienced by each generation would be different, where do humans get the power to construct and expand their own consciousness and world of meaning?
The history of painting is still being rewritten. Even if technology becomes highly advanced, replacing human imagination and images, our desire for painting will never stop. For us, we are the most mysterious subject of great mystery. Technology, science, knowledge and information cannot replace human emotions and love. This is why painting, as a time-honored medium, still sits on the throne of art. We reflect on what painting offers us through the fifteen past awardees of Chongkundang Yesuljisang.