Pious Worship for Greatness of Mother Nature
Hang-seop Shin (Art Critic)
The reason why artists come to this world is to ceaselessly boost the life of humanity to the boundaries of the ideal. Among diverse forms of art, painting pursues an ideal world by using visual perceptions. Nothing is more practical than what is visible. Among visual arts, painting is not limited in time and space. What is more, it exists in the spaces of daily human lives. While music exists through hearing, its substances cannot be embodied in specific entities. While literature and other forms of art have close relationships with visual activities, they must borrow mechanical power or are subject to spatial constraints. Besides, it is not easy to grasp the whole picture at a glance. In comparison, fine art, especially painting, does not have much external constraints in terms of its existence. Painting shows boundaries of ideal human life in more real and concrete manner. This is the very reason why painting is loved by many people.
Hong-eul Jang can be called an artist who brings the beauty of nature closest to the beauty of our ideal. His paintings very clearly show why nature is beautiful. Every human being feels that nature is beautiful when they see it.
Still, this feeling of beauty may be vague. Probably it may be just sympathy with the general perception that nature is beautiful. Of course, human emotion has an aesthetic sense that can distinguish beauty from ugliness. It is a common for everyone to feel beautiful when seeing a flower. But it is not generally easy for people to explain why the flower is beautiful. Being able to explain or describe the beauty of a flower requires a certain education. Through this course of education, a professional, or a painter, is created.
Hong-eul Jang went through an educational course with professional knowledge for a painter to be able to explain beauty in detail. This educational opportunity is given to those who are talented in painting or who want to become a painter. Yet, even in those with professional education, there are few who command such special aesthetic senses and skills as his case.
Hong-eul Jang has pushed up his great innate talent or potential to the extreme. In other words, in so far as the matter of drawing well is concerned, he has already reached a highest point. Remarkable skills which he showed in 'Paintings of Mountains and Rivers of the South and North Korea' in 1994 were beyond extreme at that moment. Surely, he’s already transcended beyond the level of being compared with someone else.
Hong-eul Jang’s standing as an artist became firm from that point. We may even say that outstanding awards he received in the great competitions in China before were only a preparation for the exhibition 'Paintings of Mountains and Rivers of the South and North Korea’ because, through the exhibition, he drew out his ability to the utmost which even he himself does not find the limit.
From the planning stage, the exhibition set a clear goal and he only had to devote himself to achieving that goal. In a way, the period for the preparation of 'Paintings of Mountains and Rivers of the South and North Korea’ may have been the time for him to be the most faithful to himself as a painter because it was a time for him to be genuinely dedicated and fully committed only to painting in isolation from the problems of daily living. He had an extremely simple routine of visiting, sketching and photographing famous mountains of North and South Korea and carving the impressions and inspirations of the mountains in his heart and soul.
What else can give a painter greater happiness than being able to be solely and fully engrossed in painting? I suppose that he must have been surprised at the very ability he possesses in himself during the exhibition of 'Paintings of Mountains and Rivers of the South and North Korea’. Until then, even though he had the confidence in his own ability to surprise the world, he would not have been able to confirm the ability in reality. While he may have had a firm confidence in the function of his hands to accurately describe what he sees, it is different from self-conviction. In this respect, the exhibition 'Paintings of Mountains and Rivers of the South and North Korea’ worked as a firm motive that forced him into submission to his own incredible ability.
A glance at the catalog of 'Paintings of Mountains and Rivers of the South and North Korea’ makes even those who belittle realism or realistic landscapes realize by how useless prejudices their eyes have been blinded. It is a stern warning to the wrong view that the specific description is a simple functionality. He squarely rejects blind acquiescence to the things visible to his eyes. He only follows his own eye for beauty tamed by aesthetic sensibility.
His eyes vividly capture magnificent images of the grand nature that human beings cannot even dare to emulate. People often compare realistic paintings to photographs. They compare them to the photographs because they think "Why not taking pictures instead of taking all the pains if you are trying to draw realistic paintings?" This is a misunderstanding or prejudice or lack of insight resulting from the inability to understand paintings and photographs correctly.
While photographs only show the actual images without any adjustments, painting are products of reinterpretation by aesthetic eyes, no matter how realistic the descriptions may be. In other words, painting may seem to deliver the visible facts as they are, but in fact they are beautifully reconstructed by satisfying the formative requirements of painting through the process of partial selections. Color images in paintings are quite different from those captured by camera lens. Even if they are painted exactly as they are visible to the eyes, the colors of painting are different from those of reality.
Though he realistically portrays Mother Nature, it is actually reinterpreted according to his own ideal of painting. Thus, the beauty of the nature which cannot be detected by our daily view is spread out before our eyes in good order. His paintings organize in manifest manner how to see the beauty of grand nature. It is needless to say that the image of Mother Nature which he presents to us is something which cannot be summarized by our ordinary view.
In short, he demonstrates an outstanding ability to transform real images into a formative beauty through inherent aesthetic sensibilities and what he learned through painting lessons. This not only presents us a completely new way of understanding the world but also allows us to taste the aesthetic emotions for pure beauty. Landscape painting is a process of transforming nature into new images by compressing and transferring it to a different spatial plane.
Natural beauty we feel is something abstract or something not formalized. The fact that we have different feelings from one another when we look at the beauty of nature is a clear proof that beauty is an abstract value. That’s right. He has his own independent formative way of understanding and interpreting nature. The way he commands is a mixture of traditional Eastern landscape techniques and Western realistic techniques. Hence, his way keeps a certain distance from the Molgol technique (沒骨法) or Wooruek technique of the traditional watercolor painting.
Looking at overall picture, his painting feels rather like a Western-style painting. However, the materials of traditional Ink wash painting manifest characteristics as a unique style of painting. Like Western naturalist style, they are beautifying nature in very concrete manner while realizing such transparency that seemed to look deep into fine details. While traditional materials of Ink wash painting are infiltrated into and become integrated with paper or silk, the paints in oil painting are laid on the canvas. In oil painting, only the coloring effect of the paints can be expected, different from transparency.
Even in a realistic description, the difference between Eastern painting and Western painting is obvious. In effect, realistic description in his work has very delicate senses like nerve cells of a human body. It is more concrete and practical than photographs and it is superior to photographs even in terms of image clarity. It is the result of absorbing and embracing the emotions of grand Nature by mobilizing all his physical senses and aesthetic sensibilities instead of the camera lenses when he explores the mountains of North and South Korea. He is feeling and understanding nature deep enough when he see it. And such intellectual understanding and emotions are liable to be contained in the process of realistic description.
Specific description of an object is also a result of intellectual understanding. Rational expressions, rather than emotional ones, take absolutely dominant position. As only visible facts and grounded expression are allowed, there seems to be no space for free emotional expressions. The process of pursuing a cold and clear formal beauty could not be compromised with any free images.
What’s the result of such descriptions which come thoroughly close to reality? It is power. Forms of the mountains visible to our eyes and all kinds of things in them or things supporting the phenomenal system in his mountain paintings are the huge mountain ranges or nature’s blood vessels which are the raised earth’s crust. Mountain ranges that look like traces of enormous wriggling are a symbol of power which looks like energetic and constant boiling of magma inside the Earth’s crust by volcanic activity. What his landscape paintings find and embody is none other than the inner strength of the Earth. Thus, the mountains and other natural scenes that he reproduces reveal magnificent images. They are not confined in realistic aesthetics or faithful reproduction of simply visible things and facts but they show magnificent dramas of nature.
Probably for that reason, things like human history do not seem to have much of a meaning in his landscape paintings. They just repeat self-confirmation that they are nothing more than the trivial. We feel the greatness of nature in his landscape painting which humans cannot even dare to come close. It is related to the composition of unique viewpoint which attracts and compresses natural scenery into the image that comes into view. This is the result of his having learned and mastered what beauty of majesty is all about. It is not really easy to bring back the overwhelmed emotion felt in front of actual nature on a reduced painting plane. It is impossible to express the dynamic power unless a painter does not exactly grasp the dynamic images of majestic mountains which render humans infinitely small.
It seems that his paintings have unusual sense of capturing dynamic flow of mountains like images of human arteries. All the lines used in his mountain paintings maintain rhythm. They are faithful to the principle that every peak visible to the eye (on the image) should remain as an organism belonging to a single massive earth while giving each mountain an independent formative beauty. Thus, flows of the outlines which delineate the shapes of the mountains are flexible as well as imposing. And the lines are long and steady as well. The majesty and magnificence of mountains are drawn as giants that have cultivated and honed themselves even before the existence of humankind. That’s right. His mountain paintings look like colossal humans lying or standing.
Occasionally human beings appear in some of his paintings, which work as a form to describe real aspects of traditional life of Korean ethnic group in China. His deep understanding and affection for the traditional Korean ethnic customs in China while retaining Chinese nationality come from introspection as an artist leading the culture.
Perhaps this kind of his interest in traditional culture may be a logical and natural choice for him as an artist who stands for realistic aesthetics because constant interest in and concern for the reality in which a person lives can be an apparent evidence for the time. In reality, customs and life of the Korean ethnic group in China still remains the same as those of the South Korean society at least 40 to 50 years ago. Their way of life and culture as well as living environment is still remain almost unchanged.
It is marvelous for us in these modern times to see traditional lifestyle that seemed to send us back to the past. Perhaps his affection for the life of ethnic Koreans in China comes from the awareness of the predictable flow of reality that it will be disappearing before long.
In his masterpieces on the life of ethnic Koreans in China, his aesthetic sense is most beautifully formed. Daily life of the ethnic Korean women in China dressed in Chimajogori, traditional costume, exhibits utmost beauty in harmony with nature. They even go so far as to remind us how beautiful the way of life conforming to nature can be.
As such, his works of dealing with the life of ethnic Korean people in China are the result of absolute obedience to or respect for Mother Nature. They stress that nature is not the object for us to overcome. The painting of a person walking on a winding mountain path on an enormous mountain or the painting of an old man riding an ox cart on a trail through the woods delivers us a poeticcally touching and lingering emotions. It is a kind sadness like feeling lumps in our throat.
Isn’t it the result of learning through his real hiking experiences that there is inherent sublimity in Mother Nature which can never be broken by the power of humans as well witnessed in his paintings? Hence, some mysterious spiritual resonance sends us a thrill as we look at his works. It is not just because of the surprise that comes from the brilliant depiction of forms by unsurpassed craftsmanship. It is because our feelings are captured by unknown energy which comes from the images of the ethereal Mother Nature.
A Born Painter singing the Power of Earth
Hong, Jung-gil (Milal Museum)