Those bricks gradually close in, leaving no room to focus on any particular composition or perspective. Only the bricks flicker before the eyes, emphasized by the flatness of the surface, the natural color of sand, and accompanying shadows. This is the first sense one receives from Kim Kang-yong's "<Reality + Image>."
Why, of all possible motifs, did Kim choose emotionless bricks, the kind you would expect to be used to make buildings? Stacks of bricks simply rest there, arranged either 'neatly' or 'chaotically. To find the reason, we need to go back to the 1970s, when Kim began his work. Like other contemporary painters, he was greatly interested in precise representations of surrounding objects. These artists also noted things like cobblestones, railroad tracks, sofas, wall surfaces, film posters, and even construction signboards. Those themes actually represented a historic form of experimentation at the time; before then, no one had thought to regard such ordinary items as an artistic subject. By emphasizing the inanimate nature, the artists shared characteristics with the minimalists, understanding the item as an object.
In the early to mid-1970s, Kim liked to stretch a white canvas out on an easel and take his kerosene can and palette to paint chaotic interior landscapes and green lawns. Occasionally, one can also see landscapes like a garbage can by the corner of a makeshift shack, or black swarms of mayflies and moths clustering around a street lamp as it lights up the darkness. Even then, Kim Kang-yong was focusing on everyday subject matter, but he appears to have paid attention to "place-ness" rather than to magnifying parts of the object. This is true for his studio interiors, broad fields of grass, and alleys. If there is a feature distinguishing his work from ordinary landscape art, it is that he appears to have placed more importance on how the landscape is to be transferred than on the landscape itself. With the fields of grass, what stands out is the surface texture; with urban landscapes, the surreal composition; and with the atelier images, the delicate rendering of the painting tools.
Working with Sand
The situation changed around 1976 as sand began to assume a place as an important element in Kim's work. Kim takes sand from the beach and filters it through a sieve, then spreads the fine particles onto a hemp sack or cloth, adding light shading to give a sense of thickness. The result blurs the line between sand, painting, and objet d'art. In the early to mid-1990s, Kim produced works using loess or kaolin as a painting material instead of sand. With the resulting simple shapes, these works create a spreading effect reminiscent of the ink in Eastern paintings, hinting at a variety of images such as horses, cows and trees. Kim’s works began to gain prominence in the late 1990s, and his work brought a fresh breeze to the international art scene.
In Kim's paintings, bricks exist only as images. They appear to be bricks, but they are, in fact, mere illusions; we perceive these illusions as bricks. In this way, the painting skillfully dismantles boundaries as it moves back and forth between the real and the image. Rather than being a receptacle to contain the real, the canvas becomes a medium that reveals the two-dimensionality of an image detached from reality. Because the bricks seem so real, they give the viewer the impulse to touch them. How did the artist achieve this visual effect?
First, he spreads sand (or, more recently, grinding stones) on the canvas and waits for it to adhere completely. Then, after sufficient time has passed, he lifts his brush and applies shading. Some paintings have two colors of bricks instead of one, and the painting process is similar in this case as well: after first spreading sand of one color, he carves out the areas intended for another color and fills them with sand of that hue. Shading plays a crucial role in his work, often determining the success of the piece. He renders the cracks in the bricks by following along lines marked with a slender brush, and he applies bright colors to the protruding portions. He then adds shadow behind the protruding portions, making it appear as though the bricks are bulging outward and falling back inward.
Shadow is another important element in understanding Kim's paintings. The artist has said outright that he has painted shadows rather than bricks. As mentioned in the working process described above, he carefully shapes a surface embedded with sand grains of a single color, as though leveling the ground. Sand plastering is to Kim Kang-yong what a base coat is for other artists. It is shading alone that transforms those grains into bricks, and it is entirely through the adding of shadow that the artist generates the effects of a divided surface, of some parts projecting outward and others falling inward, of bricks appearing jumbled or stacked high. Hence, the secret behind Kim’s creation of an illusion of reality by giving the appearance of brick forms, or by giving them expression, essentially lies in shadow.
Because Kim's paintings are so realistic, they have often been categorized as hyperrealism. The artist has a different idea, however. "People often categorize my work as hyperrealism, but the bricks in my paintings are all an illusion. They are all 'virtual bricks.' For me, bricks are merely the subjects that express my artistic world; the bricks themselves are not important. The theme of my work is repetition and formativity," he says. The artist is apparently disinclined to classify his own paintings, which are based on the representation of the real, as hyperrealism.
As far as "repetition" is concerned, there are few who can match Kim. Just as the minimalist artists viewed repetition as an ironclad rule, he, too, values repetition. His work is realized through the repetition of identical objects; specifically, it is a style in which the same form is repeated over and over. The forms that appear in the upper left corner are partitioned according to the same standards as those on the upper right corner, and even on the next row, the shapes are produced according to the same rule. This act is repeated identically all the way to the very bottom. If the sizes varied or the rows became irregular, it would break the sense of left-right symmetry and the order governing from top to bottom, disrupting the balance of the entire work. The repeated, regular multiplication of the same shape thus adds a sense of tension to the canvas.
Of course, one can also see aspects that make use of the subtleties of composition. Kim's recent works show heaping stacks of bricks, and the same bricks in jumbled masses on the ground or strewn about randomly. While the orderly assumes a rhythm of repetition, the jumbled assumes a rhythm of transformation. Even then, however, the size of the bricks does not change. This order of repetition is something valued by the artist, and he does not disrupt it.
‘Object Paintings’
In recent years, Kim has been tackling the new challenge of expanding his surfaces into three-dimensional structures. Here, one can see something very characteristic of the artist, who does not content himself with reality and instead sets out on a journey of new challenges and quests.
Kim has now developed his images of bricks from flat "walls" into three-dimensional "pillars." He reportedly conceived the idea for these works while walking through the skyscraper-flanked streets of Manhattan, where he was surrounded by great pillars. While the bricks may have "grown" into pillars, there has been no essential change in the way that the structures represent a continuation of the surface and further amplify the concept of "virtuality." The illusion from one point of view spreads into an illusion from four directions. Thus, the relationship between reality and image moves farther apart, or perhaps closer together.
Bricks can be found everywhere, but these landscapes do not exist anywhere in reality and can only be found in the paintings of Kim Kang-yong. This exemplifies the power of art: transforming the ordinary and mundane into something new. One can see why the American art critic Robert Morgan praised Kim's paintings as "extraordinary and somewhat enigmatic."
by. Seo Seong Rok