LAYER BY LAYER
Ink Painting between Tradition and Modernity
In the mid-thirteenth century the Chinese painter Zhao Mengjiun created the work The Three Friends of Winter. The portrait, now in Taipei's National Palace Museum and dated to 1260, shows a branch with delicate plum blossoms. It rests majestically on a pine branch with bamboo grass growing on its sides. At present, the depiction of these three symbols, which, according to the Daoist world View, stand for the perpetual in nature, is one of the earliest and presumably the only graphic realisation that combines these three pictorial motifs.
In Zhao Mengjin's work, their combination, the superimposition of the three plants that ward off the cold of winter, can be interpreted as a symbol of the hope of the Song Dynasty's continued existence. Embodying Daoist values such as renewal, constancy and endurance the plum blossom, the pine tree and the bamboo grass stand for the continuation of the aforementioned ruling dynasty, which was to fall only a few years later in the course of the Mongol conquest of southern China in 1279.1)
The relationship between cultural heritage and renewal, as it clearly emerges in this work, is at the heart of modern ink painting, as it continues to be in contemporary art in Korea, where it flourished in the 1980s after colonial rule from 1910 to 1945. Bamboo, one Of the most symbolic motifs in Asian cultural history, builts the centre of the Korean artist Kim Hyunkyung's work.
In her large-format drawings, she transfers the biological structure of the freshwater grass which is one of the most widespread woody plant species in Asia, into a natural image determined by geometric forms. The culms of the bamboo plants, which rise up from underground rhizomes, appear abstract when reduced to their individual segments. The fine subdivision of the so-called nodes, which denote the compacted, ring-shaped areas, and the smooth sections running between them, which are described as internodes, are interrupted in their strict form running through the painting surface by attached leaves.
Rhythm and dynamics emerge. This becomes particularly clear within a series of works created under the title The Bamboo–Shining between 2013 and 2016. As lines extending vertically across the painting ground, the stalks in their telescopically drifting growth guide the viewer's gaze from the deep densely applied black of the Korean ink at the edge of the picture into the middle ground defined by the delicate white Of the roughened picture surface.
This form of guiding the gaze into a contemplative moment of absolute stillness is further intensified in a two-part work of the same named series in the choice of the picture format, a trapezoid. The deliberate diversion from the density of the bamboo forest at the broad edge of the picture to the monochrome clarity of the narrow surface opposite, which symbolises the intrusion of sunlight, becomes the decisive paradigm in the artist's ink painting.
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The work of the Chinese artist Zhao Mengjiun, an ink drawing on paper, is not exemplary for its choice of motif alone. With regard to Kim Hyunkyung's works, it demonstrates the fundamental creative principles of ink paintiny. This has always been characterised by expressive brushstrokes and their manifold shades, varied by the rhythm of movement and the force of application.
The concentration that is at the forefront of this artistry in the Asian tradition is reflected in the reduction to the four materials used for this purpose: In addition to ink, which was already made before the Han period either from soot from pine wood or the burnt oil of the Wutong tree, as well as with glue extracted from animal bones and aromatic substances such as camphor and musk, a stone is used on which the ink is mixed with water, as well as a broad, pointed hair brush and absorbent paper as a ground.
A pictorial representation of this production process can be found on a cross-scroll from the time of the Qing empire, which is now in the collection of the Museum Rietberg in Zurich. The painting on silk, which the Chinese illustrator Chen Hongshou entitled Four Scenes from the Life of the Tang Poet Bai Juyi around 1649, shows the poet writing one of his poems In one of four portraits.
On the low shelf at his feet, next to a water scoop, ink and a rubbing stone can be seen. With the brush in his right hand and the sheet in front of him, they represent the so-called "Four Treasures of the Scholar's Studio."2)
Kim Hyunkyung's delicate works on paper, which take us into a dark realm of the forest, are based on this tradition. Bright red imprints, such as those on the works Memory–To Wind from 2009, testify to the artist's cultural ties. As a graphic accent, the script seals, so-called Zhuwen stamps, take up the centuries-old connection between ink painting and caligraphy as a return to a form associated with the scholarly art of Asia.3) in doing so, Kim Hyunkyung visibly departs from the clear, austere forms of her models.
In the superimposition of the vertical lines crossing the picture in front of a foliage drawn in the back ground. the individual plant segments blur and evoke the movements caused by the wind between the single bamboo stalks towards a tonal sensation. The rhythm dictated by the dụctus of the ink application leads to a gentle melody Of the bamboo forest In the dissolution of the clearly accentuated brushstroke in works such as The Wind–The Flying from 2010 or Memory–See from the following year.
In this form of superimposing layers of ink, the ink as a water-soluble dye that melts on the paper before it is completely absorbed, allows the time that separates the direct application from its painterly result to become the second theme in the artist's work. The transience of a fleeting moment, of a thought that gets caught in the foliage, is here pictorially realised layer by-layer.
In the layering of brushstrokes, as well as the folding and constant overpainting of already worked surfaces, as in one of her most recent drawings entitled Into the Space, the artist's work opposes a traditional, clearly defined application of ink and turns towards modernity in its spontaneous, painterly gesture.
The development of Kim Hyunkyung's techniques, the use of burnt paper patterns, as well as the creative opening up of her motivic concentration on other symbolic plants such as the plum blossom in her most recent cycles, makes her overall work appear to be a continuation of a post-liberal abstraction as described by Youngna Kim in A Brief History of Modern Art in Korea.4)
In the synthesis of mythical nature and philosophical values, which she artistically places in the image through reduction and the resulting concentration, the Korean artist's works, in their meditative clarity with a view to contemporary Korean art, are reminiscent of Yun-Hee Toh's landscape compositions created in chalk and graphite as well as Byung-Hun Min's nature photographs, which focus on light and shadow and are characterised by the dew and mist of the seasons Like the works of the Seoul-born installation artist Kibong Rhee, they maintain a balance between the eternal and the fleetingness of the moment – between tradition and modernity.
Dr. phil. Sarah Donata Schneider, July 2021.
[footnote]
1. See Mackenzie, Colin et al. (eds.): The Chinese Art Book, 2013, Phaidon, London, p. 20.
2 Karlsson, Kim: Pinselstrich und Poesie. Die Einheit von Kalligrafie, Malerei und Dichtung, In: Karlsson, Kim, von Przychowski, Alexandra (eds.): Magie der Zeichen. 3000 Jahre chinesische Schriftkunst, 2015, exhibition catalogue Museum Rietberg Zurich, Scheidegger & Spiess, Zurich, pp. 160-165, here p. 161.
3 See Karlsson, Kim: Pinselstrich und Poesie. Die Einheit von Kalligrafie, Malerei und Dichtung, In: Karisson, Kim, von Przychowski, Alexandra (eds.): Magie der Zeichen. 3000 Jahre chinesische Schriftkunst, 2015, exhibition catalogue Museum Rietberg Zurich, Scheidegger & Spiess, Zurich, pp. 160-165, here p. 161.
4 See Kim, Youngna: A Brief History of Korean Modern Art. In: Amirsadeghi, Hossein (ed.): Korean Art. The Power of Now, 2013, Thames & Hudson, London, pp. 10-17, here pp. 14ff.