Simon Morley (critics)
Writing at the beginning of the twentieth century, Max Weber, one of the founding fathers of modern sociology, argued that Western society was increasingly dominated by a “process of rationalization” that was overcoming nature’s “mysterious and incalculable powers” and making the world reachable, calculable, manageable, and predictable. But despite the obvious benefits of such ‘rationalization’ in terms of medical breakthroughs, economic progress, efficient social organization, and access to useful technology, Weber saw that the unintended consequence of all this innovation and ‘development’ was that the world was losing its color, magic, and ‘voice’. Its fundamental meaningfulness for humanity. People were becoming progressively more alienated from a world that seemed to be falling silent and turning icy cold. Weber called this experience ‘disenchantment’, and since the period in which he was writing, globalization has brought the West’s ‘process of rationalization’ to greater and greater proportions of humanity, including South Koreans, who today live in one of the most rapidly and successfully ‘rationalized’ societies in the world. In especially extreme ways, South Koreans are reaping the benefits and suffering the worrying consequences of living during a period of ‘disenchantment’.
One vital role for art in such a ‘disenchanted’ world is to offer small oases of ‘re-enchantment’. This is the task Kim Keetae has set himself. He seems to be motivated by an overwhelming desire to ‘re-enchant’ the natural world. Uncanny lights descend from the night sky, fires burn brightly amongst dark trees or in the middle of the ocean, awe-inspiring bolts of lightning rend the twilight. In looking at Kim’s paintings, we feel we are witness to miraculous, extra-ordinary events that we are unlikely to ever forget. On could, in fact, describe Kim’s paintings as precise visual representations of nature’s “mysterious and incalculable powers”.
The world Kim Keetae magics into existence is not ‘beautiful’, in the sense of comforting and pleasurable. He shows us a world that lies far beyond the reach of ‘rationalization’ and is no longer framed as it once was in relation to traditional religious beliefs. His paintings draw on similar nature symbols and metaphors to those used in Christian art to indicate a sacred presence or divine power – symbols like water, darkness, light, and fire - but this is definitely not religious art. They touch on the same deep levels of human consciousness that religion traditionally addressed but from the position of a non-believer - from within a secular worldview.
The settings and events Kim depicts are what in art theory are usually termed ‘sublime’. This is a concept that within the limits of secularized thought describes the experiences formerly considered within a religious worldview. The sublime is what we feel when we are confronted by natural and humanly-made phenomena and experiences that are physically and mentally overwhelming: the incalculably large or complex, the awe-inspiringly powerful. The sublime is an exhilarating experience that is tinged with terror and fear, but also with wonder and delight.
Kim Keetae has invented what he calls The Unknown Artist. This person, he informs us, is the actual creator of the paintings we see. Furthermore, Kim claims that what is depicted in the paintings wasn’t imagined by The Unknown Artist: he or she actually saw what is depicted. This is why all the startling natural phenomena are painted in a ‘photographic’ style, that one could describe as perfectly acceptable to the rational, scientific mind. That is to say, they are painted as if the phenomena are objectively ‘real’. The implication is that The Unknown Artist isn’t ‘dis-enchanted’, isn’t alienated from the world, isn’t enslaved to the ‘process of rationalization’. But of course, in reality, the paintings are all conjured from Kim’s fertile imagination. They are the result of the creative transformation of the given, everyday world.
Kim Keetae’s paintings remind us that what makes life genuinely ‘enchanting’ is our relationship to the unreachable, the incalculable, the unmanageable, the unpredictable. Everything that lies beyond our control, but to which we can respond with openness, awe, humility, and hope.
