KIM YUNSEOB: AFTER READING: SEOUL

 

 

1.

Kim Yunseob is a narrative painter. He tells stories.  But his paintings present visual puzzles that do not so much demand time to solve - to interpret or decode correctly like symbols or a linguistic text - but rather invite us to remain in a space of evocative suggestion.

Kim trained as an illustrator, and for him an important formative influence has been comics. As a result, it must have seemed self-evident that in addition to anything a painting might achieve on the level of aesthetic or formal values it also tells a story. He adopted painting and the context of fine art because he wanted to express himself more directly and on more sophisticated levels than seemed possible within the conventions of illustrational art, but rater than abandoning the conventions he had learned and loves, he set about reorganizing and distancing himself from them.

Comics depend on linear drawing to clearly describe forms, and while Kim Yunseob remains wedded to linear drawing, he has also introduced the ‘painterly’ and tactile effects that can be achieved using the fine art painting media of oil or acrylic paint. He also adopted a variety of figurative styles, rejecting the homogeneous representational world that is established using a single figurative style that is typical of the comic book.  To tell a story, a comic usually gives the perception of narrative progression through using a layout of sequentially ordered and unidirectional panels surrounded by borders or outlines. Instead, Kim blurs or abandons boundary lines, thereby disrupting the linear sequence of moments within the narrative. His compositional method is similar to collage in fine art, or more directly, to how images can be ‘Photoshopped’ together within the digital format. The result is not so much the ‘appropriation’ of images, as it was for the postmodernists of the late 1970s and 1980s, as a ‘remix’, a term most often used in relation to contemporary music, but which is a basic characteristic of digital culture in general, and which involves a potentially much more radical transformation of sources.  As a result, in Kim Yunseob’s work disparate images and styles get juxtaposed within a single frame in such a way that the relationships between the parts are more visually instantaneous than in a comic book, and the narrative content is inevitably more layered, elusive, and opaque, generating an indeterminate field of meanings.

 

2.

Historically, most art told stories which derived from religion, mythology, legend, history, literature, or important aspects of everyday life. But in the nineteenth century in Europe a reaction set in against story-painting amongst the avant-garde.  Artists recognized that because of the forces unleashed by modernity, the shared symbolic order upon which the old narratives had been based were increasingly fragmented or wholly absent. But the avant-garde also saw these stories as backward-looking, and for them, all true art must be of the present. They also argued that the role of story-telling more rightly belonged to literature, theatre, and, increasingly, film. Visual art, by contrast, was a plastic medium, a material form. Modernism was as a result inherently anti-narrative. However, with the ‘post-modern’ turn in the late 1970s and 1980s, the narrative dimension returned to visual art with a vengeance. But with a major difference. The stories were hybrid and fragmentary. Rather than ignore this abyssal distance from the past like the modernists, the ‘postmodernist’ allegorists sought to explore it. They were interested in the problems involved in storytelling in an era when the traditional shared symbolic order based on the old ‘grand narratives’ no longer served to unite society.

One way to describe the renewed interest in narrative that begin with post-modernism and which has now become a dominant aspect of much modern painting, is to say that art became allegorical again. Historically, the term ‘allegory’ describes when the subject of an artwork or the elements within a composition are used to represent some deeper meaning related to the ‘big’ issues addressed by morality and religion, such as life, death, love, virtue, justice.  Allegory is different from symbolism. It emerged in response to a growing feeling of estrangement from tradition, from the awareness that there was a widening gap between the present and the past which meant symbols could no longer communicate their unequivocal meaning. Therefore, allegory involves ceaselessly piling up fragments without any strict idea of a goal, and because of the sense of lost wholeness, allegory, as Walter Benjamin wrote, is always created ‘under the gaze of melancholy’.

Today, forty years later, allegory has become a dominant impulse especially amongst contemporary painters. But unlike the postmodernists, who saw the allegorical turn as announcing the impossibility of using art as a medium of self-expression, many of today’s prominent painters mine the history of their medium, and of their wider cultural context, to assist them in the construction of visual narratives concerning their own personal ‘mythos’ - their set of beliefs and assumptions about life.  But they embrace painting’s own history not because of any confident sense of continuity. Rather, they are motivated by a painful awareness of rupture and alienation, combined with a yearning for the possibility of somehow achieving once again some kind of resonant relationship. 

 

3.

Kim Yunseob’s disruption of narrative space, his hybridizing of styles, and appropriations of visual and literary sources, is driven by what he describes as ‘restlessness, melancholy, or perhaps an overwhelming sense of fervor.’  Kim is working with a set of formal artistic conventions and concepts of the relationship between art and subjectivity that originated in the West but have now becomes globally dominant. So, his efforts to evolve a personal mythos through and within his work occurs in an attenuated connection with the ‘master narratives’ of the West. This inevitably places Kim in an overtly allegorical relationship to the past, in the sense that the distance he feels is inevitably far greater for a Korean than for, say, an English artist. To this is added a second distancing effect:  from Kim’s own historical traditions, from the past of Korea, caused by the rapid modernization of his country. But the sense of rupture is now also compounded by a third distancing effect: the one created by the collapse within the West of faith in the very ‘grand narratives’ upon which modernity was founded.

In one series of paintings, Kim re-interprets the story of Robinson Crusoe as an allegory of the artist as social castaway. He is specially interested in Friday, Crusoe’s native servant, because he is drawn to the subaltern, the non-Western protagonist with whom he inevitably feels an affinity. Being placed in a position of cultural marginality and of inferiority can manifests itself as irony, resentment, rage, or violence, and these energies can potentially give an artist’s work great iconoclastic power. But Kim was inspired by Michel Tournier’s novel from 1967, Friday, or The Other Island, and notes that what especially interested him in it was, as he writes: ‘the depiction of humans creatively interacting with nature. In contrast to Western imperialist thought, Friday, rather than exhibiting anger or violence, chooses artistic play and thus transforms Robinson Crusoe’. 

From the evidence of Kim Yunseob’s work, bridging the chasm between past and present and West and East for him also means performing an act of restitution, a healing of wounds.  It is this double labor – of simultaneously doing damage and making reparation – that gives Kim Yunseob’s work its strange power.

 

Simon Morley