Kim Kang-Yong
Reality+Image
Sep 26 - Oct 19, 2008Gana Art Center
Kim Kang-yong's Brick Painting
Assuming that the canon of Modernism is applied to the analysis of medium and form in the fundamental structure of painting and two-dimensionality, Kim Kang-yong's brick painting can be classified as a Modernist work. Even if Kim's painting seems to represent everyday objects such as bricks as they are, Modernist art critics may assert that his work is subordinated to illusionism and trompe l'oeil, or the "trick the eye" technique.
In terms of form, Kim's painting consists of the parallels of bricks that are all of regular size and mostly appear neat and refined without any cracks or spots. Otherwise, his work features the continuation of bricks of sand that appear fine, yet somewhat coarse-grained. To be more accurate, Kim evenly applies a mixture of sand and adhesives to canvas using a knife and then employs sand color or bright colored paints, as seen in recent works, generating a sense of reality by adding shadows in dark colors. Kim reinforces a realistic, illusory feeling by making some bricks look protruding or dented or by adding shadows in oblique directions. As part of his attempt to make the bricks look more realistic, Kim gives a sense of depth to the sides of the bricks in addition to the front. When seeing his work, viewers remain confused as to whether they are looking at real bricks or merely images of bricks.
In the early 1980s when a wave of hyperrealism surged in the Korean art scene, Kim Kang-yong began his brick pieces with precise, meticulous, and realistic depictions. In his early brick paintings, Kim placed bricks, like illusions, on the background of a coarse surface implying the vestiges of time and place, demanding us to raise our awareness of this extremely banal everyday object. His brick paintings then underwent some changes and began to exclude any depiction of atmosphere and suppress emotional expressions as much as possible. The bricks, rendered through the repetition of acute lines and shadows and formed in an all-over composition, bring about a sense of the industrial, as if made by machines in a factory. The sand color and darkish, shaded tones are prevailing in these paintings.
Some elements of his painting, such as the omission of any diverse expressions or hues, all-over composition, and the repetition of a rigid square form can be seen as an extension of Minimalism. Meanwhile, his work is distinguished from Minimalist painting by the differences in its shading and its either slight or conspicuous protrusions from the even surface of the canvas unlike Minimalist repetition or a parallel arrangement of the same element in the same direction. Kim's paintings can be seen as part of the meta-language of monochrome painting and Korean-style Minimalism that emerged as alternatives to radical Modernist formalism that overwhelmed the Korean art scene in the 1970s. Kim's paintings in this period are particularly marked by an overriding three-dimensional quality over two-dimensionality, figurative images over abstraction, calculated intention over impulsiveness, a relationship with irrelevance, a contradictory composition rather than unified visual angles and scale, and a handcrafted quality as opposed to readymade.
Kim Kang-yong addresses the matter of reproduction, a problem eternally awaiting a solution in art, with bricks, a mundane, trivial object. People generally say that when Kim depicts a brick like a real brick, it appears quite similar and is very well done. Kim's brick painting starts from this point. At the initial stage, he tried to reveal and intensify the similarities with real bricks. He employed sand as a medium to give his reproduced images a sense reality. As if Kim eventually reached the understanding that the reproduced image never can become reality, his following work put greater importance on composition rather than image, completely excluding the somewhat dream-like, expressive elements found in his previous work.
Kim's canvas, filled with neatly refined shapes and rectangular cubes, is regarded as his reaction to Minimalism. The artist, however, still sticks to the rendition of realistic images by employing the method of shading and sand as a main medium. Kim, however, emphasizes the subject's own will to make images, seeing them not merely as objects of a painting. He intentionally highlights certain conflicting viewpoints and scales, as seen from multiple visual angles, disregarding the notion of perspective based on one vanishing point that has been pervasive since the Renaissance.
By doing this, Kim seems closer to approaching the subject he has pursued throughout his career. At the initial stage, he intended to unveil the gap between images and reality by representing them as realistically as possible. He finally approaches the unification of an object's reality and the reality of his reproduced images through the repetition of rectangular shapes, constructional rhythms, equilibrium, and the variable directions of visual angles. His pursuit of such unification is executed through his working method performed in a state of self-oblivion.
Nonetheless, there is still a dilemma left in Kim's brick paintings. He still maintains two-dimensionality, despite generating three-dimensional illusions or the reality of an object by employing shading and adjusting the prominence and depression. As his bricks were dependent on his imagination, his work can seem more artistic, but in fact they are farther away from the concept of real images and seem to bring about other illusions. Although Kim recently has taken on this new challenge and tried to rid his work of such illusion, it remains difficult as he continues to use bricks as his main subject matter.
Rather, when his oeuvre including recent pieces are entirely reviewed, Kim's brick painting appears closer to a formative, aesthetic game between the entity and reproduction of a brick, reality and illusion, plane and cube, figuration and abstraction, reality and imagination, and, as an art critic properly pointed out, the confrontation between what we see and what is seen. Even though dealing with the subjects that easily degenerate into epistemological, rather conceptual puns or fallacies, Kim approaches them with his distinguished skill, refined sensation, and intuition. That seems to be the kernel of his aesthetics.
In this sense, his brick painting has to be understood as an exploration of form to discover the true meaning of reproduction and hyper-realistic optical tricks by shattering the fixed notions we have about them. Kim's belief that he is able to transcend the phenomenal world of images through his infatuation and unification can surely become salvation and solace for those engaging in art as well as the artist himself.