Kim Byungki: the Distribution of the Sensible
National Museum of Modern
and Contemporary Art, Korea presents 60 years of oeuvres of Kim Byungki, “a
logical and intellectual art theorist by nature whose susceptibility to the
tendency of contemporary American art honed his sharp consciousness for modern
logic of plastic art with active participation in the formation of Korean modern
abstract art after the Korean War”(Lee Guyeol, 1990). Kim was born in
Pyeongyang and experienced newly rising arts such as Surrealism and Abstract
Art in Japan at an early age and lived a true modern life. Before the outbreak
of the Korean War, he defected to South Korea and served as a painter, critic,
educator, and administrator and played a pivotal role in establishing the
foundation of Korean modern art.
Kim closely investigated
on the historical development of Western art since the days of discussing the
significance and value of Abstraction during the formative period of Korean abstract
art in which Korean art was confronted with a special socio-cultural context
with macroscopic viewpoints on the acceptance of Western art. Kim ceaselessly
questioned on the modern visual language of abstraction. After he participated
in Sao Paulo Biennale as a Korean commissioner in 1965, he abruptly decided to
live in the US and strove to concentrate on painting. From Los Angeles, where
Western civilization and Asian civilization meet, he has shipped several works,
which crossed conventionally dichotomous boundaries of abstract and figurative,
Oriental and Western, nature and civilization, spirit and material, all bounded
in unharmonious and un-tranquil tension. Despite of his centenarian age, he is
still emptying himself and continues to seek for humanistic discernment on art
and life and with this, we are assured that the spectators will realize the
mature identity and the deliberate conviction in his works.
Experimentation on Abstraction:
the Mid-1950s to the Early 1970s
Distinctive features of
current works, from mid-1950s to the early 1970s including works done after his
immigration to the US in 1965, are vigorous experimentations on abstraction
which fascinated him since his studies in Japan. After mid-1950s, when Informel swept over the Korean art world, Kim Byungki, who
was susceptible to the trends of international art world more than anyone else
around, accepted and practiced Informel theory of France and applied it to his works. He
focused more on the calligraphic aesthetic value and surrealistic double image
of Informel form which evoke mysterious narratives rather than
content and materialism of Informel,
the expression of human existence after the war. After settling in New York
State (Saratoga), Kim naturally expended his interests on abstract
expressionism. To him, abstraction is not confliction against literary feature
or realism and is instead, inclusive of all features while surpassing it at the
same time.
Coexistence of the Figure and the Non-figure: the
Early-1970s to the Late 1980s
Since the early 1970's,
the form started offering strong presence and his lifetime subject matter,
still-life and landscape, rooted on the canvas. As the gaze of the artist
stayed on life and surroundings, tools in the studio, pottery, the roadside
grass cuttings and trivial landscape around his house in Saratoga filled the
canvas. The emergence of figurative forms was not a self-contradiction or
self-confrontation on abstraction which he pursued from earlier, but a destiny
to bring more depth at the dead-end of abstraction. In fact, since his abstract
paintings had never been isolated from life, this appearance of the figurative
form is not an abrupt change. His work is not about the forms of the subject,
but it is about the process of becoming one, hence, double-representation of
reason and sensation. Such a change is not independent from a new concept and
attitude towards the art and resurgence of the wide range of images after the
abstract-expressionism. Kim's experiments on space and expressions of the drawing-like
lines in this period stand out with an intellectual and sensitive mood.
The Distribution of the Sensible: the Late-1980s to
the Early-2000s
In this period, from Kim's
first return to Korea for solo-exhibition and additional visits until he held
his last solo-exhibition in 2000, series of works including landscape of
motherland and reality of division noticeably stand out. These works can be
called political simply because he did not only use Korean landscape as
subject-matter but also represented double heterogeneity on the ironic reality
of division and modernity which disconnected from tradition with figurative
language that evokes a sense of heterogeneity in distribution of the sensible.
In this period, his
paintings negate dichotomous structure such as space and time, visibility and
invisibility, surface and depth, and reason and action. At the same time,
history and reality reveal themselves on canvas like an enigma. Style has also
been changed with bold and rough lines. Seen from the previous period, the
black lines, like Nongmuk(dark and concentrated ink), vividly cross the
canvas long and straight, and sharply split the canvas as if to restrain the
overly expressed emotion of the artist or to reveal the fragmentation of social
irregularities.
Incomplete Aesthetics: The Early-2000s to Present
One’s latter years are a
period of conformity. It is time of reconciliation with cacophony of his or her
last years, a compromise with the remaining time and reaching the comprehensive
with tolerance and harmony through contemplation on life. However, the
centenarian artist Kim is still aware of compromise and tries to create a new
from 'in-between'. Kim moved to Los Angeles and was met with a pivotal point in
mid-2000, wrapping up his 40 years of east-coast life in the US. The canvas
filled with landscapes of California, strong primary colors of the previous
period disappeared and sunny skies of Los Angeles and yellowish color of earth
predominated canvas instead. Lines with consummate brushstrokes dominate the
canvas and express the landscape of Hollywood Mountain where Kim's studio is
located, but also expresses the land and streams of motherland, where all human
beings eventually devote themselves at last. For him, mountains symbolize his
country, origin of all things to which every human returns, and nature that is
endlessly protean but is actually one. In the beginning of 2000s, the
aesthetics of his work “non finito,”
“incompleteness as a state of completion” reached its zenith. Kim
deliberately minimized flamboyant coloring and redundant depictions with
minimal but optimal deployment of the layered pigment, and as a result, the
ground of his canvas and the process through which he worked is plainly exposed
while the empty space itself is filled with abundance. This is made possible
due to his use of lines over the filling of color. As his works in this period
closely resemble “Baekmyo” (white drawing), the artist more than ever
recognizes the world with lines as a major medium, and with it, connects the
individual mind to the outside objects.
