Kim Woong’s Painting – Surface Holding Memories 
 

By Park Young-taik, Art Critic & Kyonggi University Professor

The flamboyance of lacquerware inlaid with mother-of-pearl, shining in a dusky room, and a scene of mother-of-pearl exuding light in dark lacquer occurs. The texture and brightness of linoleum glistening with soybean oil, cracks blackened by fire, the surface and jangseok (metal ornaments fixed on wooden furniture to strengthen joints) of wooden furniture to expose the grain of wood, embroidered auspicious patterns on a pillow-end, and a scene of flowers and leaves in showy colors emerge. The decoration of auspicious signs and the pattern of ten longevity symbols are all products of fantasy rather than reality. Ancient people applied these to things in daily life, and decorated them with great effort. In addition, the geometric design and order of jogakbo (Korean patchwork), made of small colorful cloth pieces echo in Kim Woong’s painting. Bobbins, thimbles, agricultural implements, meal tables, and other tools are also seen in his work.

Kim Woong’s work shows the earth’s strata keeping all kinds of images within memories. Artifacts buried deep under the earth and the things of memories and consciousness overlap in faded colors, blotted forms, and texture. For the artist, the world is filled with objects existing in his daily life. We may call his gaze at such things ‘an abstract eye’. For him however, such daily objects appear overlapped with the things of his past memories. He discovers unique abstractness in the surface, color, and form of things, set in his memories, ripening and fermenting them through the methodology of rich abstract painting. The things, reminiscent of something traditional, change into something between abstraction and figuration. Kim attains attractive creation, based on Korean tradition and international contemporariness.

Kim’s painting appears complicated, profound, and thick. The depth of his work bears longing and reminiscences, and the sorrow of loss. These are not merely images or content on the surface. All he wants to say is on the surface. The surface, however, is skin encapsulating something profound. It is an ironic, contradictory skin summoning and unfolding depths, imagination, narrative, and traces of time, while an abyss. The surface is a weird space accumulating layers of memories and time, forming archeological layers of memories. The surface is thus in a situation a certain thickness, texture, and fragments are linked and overlapped. He opens the layer of another world, covering the entire rectangular canvas. After setting a visible zone in the space of nothingness and unknown delusion, he makes the territory as a field of clandestine, implicative, and seductive vision. His painting also very physically demonstrates the fundamentals of modeling another world through overlaps of color, brush stroke, and paint.

Kim executes alchemy with oil paint. He represents the surface like copper, bronze, tile, brick, or paper. He engenders the texture and feel he wants freely in oil paint. The inflated, uplifted surface like traces of collage lend subtle texture and expression to his work, naturally conjuring up a flower-wall of an ancient Korean palace and marks of wallpaper fragments. Some paintings recall tomb murals. In his painting the sun and moon, constellations and directions are represented in signs and symbols, and images like charms demonstrate faraway myths and historical origins. Signs, symbols, and myths are conceived to recall the memories of paradise lost.

For the artist, the act of painting is identical to an act of summoning and reviving forgotten, deleted reminiscences, memories, and lingering resonances of time, to make them something earnest for him. His canvas thus bears the breath and trace of time as if melted and weathered for many years. His painting reveals traces his body leaves while living in a certain space during a given time. The artist records and interprets his own childhood reminiscences, memories, and diverse ideas through painterly materials.

Kim keeps tradition in the form of memories. Although he left his mother-country long ago, he paradoxically saved more vivid memories before leaving. Time in his memories remains unchanged, and deposited, so that he keeps his past memories vividly. For the artist, tradition is the imagery in his memories that he can draws out and uses when needed. His childhood memories are triggered by linoleum, wrapping cloth, folk items, and cabinets inlaid with mother-of-pearl. His touching, perception, and memories of these objects are the source of his work. The process of abstraction in art is to extract a part from an object, and then look at it and think it over. It also means after drawing out a specific form, emotion, or element from the everyday world, an artist underscores and represents them succinctly.

Kim Woong captures extraordinary properties within daily subject matter, recalling the surface of an object kept in memory. Fragments in his work lend refraction and depth to his canvas. Contours stop making self-satisfactory borders, seeking some shape. His canvas splits and spreads into innumerable spaces but links to the entire structure solidly and organically. A surface of intricately, densely woven low-relief appears bewitched. Each piece is a unit bearing fragments of time and memory. While the present is perceived only by the senses, the past is recognized only by memory. The tradition he saves in the form of memories in his body is the source of his self, hidden in every corner of his work. The memory is something to resist the monotonous flow of time. As memory disobeys the order of time, it becomes a spring of human identity, transcending the void and transience of time. His work’s identity derives from this.