A Tree Is Born and Grows 

Beck Jee-sook

Director

Seoul Museum of Art

When a painter paints a tree, he should make it grow.

Sukdo (17th century)

For well over a decade, the chalkboard has been the soil in which Myong Hi Kim’s paintings took root and grew. Kim’s discovery of the chalkboard as an artistic medium did not happen by chance or on a passing whim. The chalkboard is not a mere substitute for the conventional canvas. The “chalkboard painting”―if you can call it that―represents a merging of the easel used by the painter and the canvas frame seen by the viewer. It broadens modern painting’s narrow perceptual horizon that limits the attention of the artist and viewer to the surface of the canvas. By breaking down the self-imposed boundaries that convention prescribes, the chalkboard painting frees the viewer to examine it from the front, from the back, and even from the sides. One painting in particular, titled “Puzzle” (2003), showing a young girl ready to compose a sentence from a set of word cards, touches on this salient aspect of Kim’s work. For Kim, the chalkboard is a signpost that embodies her ideas, creative process, and stance as an artist. For the viewer, simultaneously, it is a symbol that expands the borders of imaginative experience of time.

Kim’s chalkboard bears little resemblance to the chalkboard affixed to the classroom wall shedding white dust all day. It is an object that gave birth to her chalkboard paintings. Returning to Korea after her seventeen-year sojourn in New York, Kim settled into an abandoned school building in a remote village in Gangwon Province. This dilapidated, seemingly dead space, possibly a fitting location for a horror movie or at best a nostalgic venue for a school reunion, came to life as she made it her studio. With her painstaking application of oil pastels, the discarded chalkboards, still showing children’s faded doodling, turned into a “garden” where she planted and nurtured her paintings. This transformation, different from a simple byproduct of a city person’s sentimentalism or an artist’s romanticism, steps well outside the typical return-to-nature narrative.

The images Kim creates on the now “nonfunctional” chalkboard provide a contact point for the past and present, but also do much more. The more the oil-pastel strokes accumulate over the chalk traces, the clearer it becomes that the chalkboard cannot regain its original function. Regardless of where it is hung, its state of separation from its original context is immediately felt, thus evoking a profound sense of dislocation. In place of real sense of location, it creates what can best be described as “delayed” version of it. In other words, the chalkboard shares the same fate as the images the artist has created on it. This phenomenon perhaps aligns with Jacques Lacan’s theory that the image of the self in the mirror assumes the self’s absence, so the image’s apparent exteriority wields a strong initial impression. As a result, the image works continuously, in real time, on the viewer’s desire for “delayed” sense of location.

“Dream” (1996-2003), showing a baby who dreams about himself as a grown boy stroking him, tells a similar story, with its juxtaposed images of the straight progression of linear time and the mystery of the “spiraling” time. This mode of image-making also appears in “Last Semester” (1995) and “The Excursion That I Missed” (1993). In each of these works, the experience retrieved from the past meets up with the present, but the retrieval in itself does not constitute its unique richness. Rather, it derives from the acknowledgment of the imaginary status of the recovered experience, paired with its incorporation into the consciousness of the present moment. A similar dynamic operates in “Abundant Absence” (1996). Although conceived at the moment of brief pause when the ray of perception penetrates through the painting, artist, and the viewer, the genesis of Kim’s paintings goes farther back in time. Each painting is its own text, and the paintings together narrate the story of Kim’s artistic journey.

In the white glare of the artificially lighted gallery space, the dark green chalkboard, while providing a contrasting backdrop for the images to pop, turns into an object. The object, first and foremost, stands for the act of teaching, the chalkboard being primarily the teacher’s domain. Through her chalkboard paintings, Kim calls attention to the potentiality and possibility of painting that have been prematurely abandoned. When questions are posed about the merits and demerits of illusionism that has long been impeded by the preponderance of two-dimensionality, Kim responds in the quiet manner of a good teacher. She has devised a “lesson plan” with her collection of chalkboard paintings. Varying in kind and size, these paintings introduce her many subjects, both people and objects, each with a dignified story to tell. The long, narrow chalkboards used in public school classrooms offer novel approaches to the treatment of time in narrative painting (“Forced Dislocation,” 2002), while the small tablets used in individual instruction revive the power of the painted image shriveled up by printing and digital technologies (“Ball Play 1, 2,” 1994).

On Kim’s chalkboard paintings, the image and text coalesce, Western mythologies keep company with Eastern symbology, and the major figures and genres in the history of Western painting intermingle. Additionally, given her firm grounding in the humanities, Kim makes frequent allusions to current social issues such as territorial division, rural exodus, exile, and dislocation. Just as the human body adapts to its surrounding soil and climate, she reacts sensitively to her environment, drawing on her observations and lived experience as an artist.

Kim’s work owes its extraordinary richness to its multi-layered configuration. The sensual richness that emanates from the sheer vitality of its subjects―energetic children, down-to-earth neighbors, fresh vegetables, and luxuriant flowers―increases twofold by the presence of underlying perception. This layering of sensation and perception, rare in the history of Korean painting, is evident in “Preparing Kimchi” (2000), similar in motif and composition to her earlier work, “Endless Thought” (1987). The subject, immersed in thought, is engaged in trimming fresh vegetables for making kimchi. While her hands are busy with food preparation, her thoughts move as briskly as the wind-swept leaves of the willow tree shown on the monitor. The warm glow, reminiscent of La Tour’s candlelight rather than Vermeer’s daylight, bathes the subject’s face. The monitor in this painting, along with the window in “Endless Thought,” represents a “picture within a picture” configuration that captures Kim’s take on the artistic process. The monitor is a metaphor she places on the metonymic surface of the chalkboard. This process parallels Roman Jakobson’s theory of poetry in which he posits that the role of poetry is to project the axis of metaphor onto the metonymic layer of language (Language in Literature).

The dual symbolism in many of Kim’s paintings lends itself to alternative interpretations of her work. For a female artist, household chores and artistic pursuits constitute the dual reality of everyday life, and a feminist critic might approach Kim’s work from that angle. One possible approach is from the vantage point of how societal demands affect her as an artist. In another approach, the critic might analyze her motifs and techniques, focusing on the ubiquity of children, women, and elderly as her subjects, and the great length she goes to represent them faithfully. Her use of a passage from “Virtuous Woman,” a chapter in the Confucian classic Five Cardinal Principles of Morality, as background supports the former interpretation. The typicality of her subjects as well as her meticulous execution supports the latter.

For an in-depth exploration of Kim’s work, the language of mythology serves as a useful guide. Viewed through the prism of Jean Shinoda Bolen’s analysis of the goddesses in Greek mythology (Goddesses in Everywoman), Kim, with her love of knowledge and devotion to language of reason, exemplifies the Athena archetype. Sprung from Zeus’s head, Athena excels not only in the masculine arts of agriculture and navigation but also in the feminine pursuits of memorial rites, needlework, and weaving. Following in Athena’s footsteps, Kim has produced several large-scale poetical works of historical significance such as “Meta-Travel along the Mound Builders’ Route” (2003) and “Han River 12 Effigy Mount Project” (2003) on the one hand and numerous “woven” works of exquisite intricacy on the other.

The images on Kim’s chalkboard paintings bring to mind shapes that are “born” rather than “made.” The image of a little boy sitting alone in a boat in “The Sea” (2003) gives off an air of unreality due to the dark-hued sea and shadowy horizon, further accentuated by exaggerated perspective. The sea is replaced by the mythic “Mother Sea,” or the depth of a mother’s womb. Under the viewer’s imaginative gaze, the hard surface of the chalkboard liquifies into dark water, the emblematic source of birth and rebirth, out of which myriad shapes of color and light spring forth. This mythical quality often prominent in Kim’s work is created by the way light illuminates the subject and the unfinished treatment of its lower body. In many origin stories of mythic heroes, the Mother Sea carries the infant hero to shore on her tides. In her paintings Kim reenacts this tale on the children’s faces, winsome images she weaves, as it were, from the sea water. If magical realism is a style of painting that purports to transcend material reality, Kim’s work undoubtedly subscribes to it.

The realistic images on Kim’s chalkboard paintings, as they travel through the cycle of past and present, the intersection of memory and illusion, and the hybrid experience of history and myth, transform into powerful symbols. The man in mailman’s uniform in “Postman” (1993) stands for the messenger from the future; the hardy-looking woman in “Hui Chul’s Mother” (1994) symbolizes a woman of childbearing age; and the little girl in “Muse with Peach” (2002) is a modern reincarnation of dongja, young apprentice in a Buddhist monastery. A boy on bicycle in “Child from the Northwest” (2003) and the identical boy in “Child from the Southeast” (2003) are mirror images, symbolic of alternate selves. These chalkboard paintings, perhaps due to their flat, untextured surfaces, are sometimes misunderstood as simple sketches or photographic representations, but the symbolic nature of their images is unmistakable. If the still life in the tradition of Western painting symbolizes a warning the future imparts to human vanitas, the image of newly harvested, gleaming vegetables in Kim’s “Harvest” (1995) stands for the animism of the here and now.

The tense in photographs, with their implicit message of memento mori, is forever shackled to the past. In contrast, the tense in Kim’s chalkboard paintings approximates that of a movie, medium characterized by diagesis rather than mimesis. As in a movie, the people and objects in Kim’s paintings move freely through time with the variations of light and shadow in the background. Prana, breath that fills and animates the human body often manifested on the smooth surfaces of Indian sculptures and paintings (Benjamin Rowland, Art in East and West), permeates Kim’s chalkboard paintings. Drawing prana, they live from moment to moment and continue to grow in the sensation, perception, and imagination of the viewer. This, for now, is the story they tell.

출처: 『본 것을 걸어가듯이 (Seeing like Walking) 』(2018)

Translated by Yer-ae K. Choi