1945–2009 Online Platform for Korean Modern and Contemporary Art

Artist of the Year 2009 Suh Yongsun "The Discreet Charm of Suh Yongsun’s Art"

Here, you see people. These people seem to be enduring their lives rather than enjoying them. The eyes of some of them do not have pupils so that their expressions are hard to read, but all of them have seemingly blank faces on the surface behind which the burning flames in each mind are gushing out by way of different colors in their own individual aura. These are the people living in the world of Suh Yongsun's painting. Suh Yongsun, who is featured at National Museum of Contemporary Art (now MMCA), Korea as the Artist of the Year 2009, is widely known for his series works in which the people in cities are depicted and for his history paintings where historical incidents are visualized, although he has dealt with a variety of themes such as figures, landscapes, history, war and myth. It was in the early 1980s when Suh began to be known to the public for a series of paintings of pine trees, and in the mid-1980s he started to produce history paintings and the 'Urban People' series. These works ruminate over the existential pain of individuals who are caught in the vortex of history and the anxious minds of modern people who are living in the suffocating space of the expanding city. In Suh's works, the problems of human existence are sublimated by way of his distinctive artistic language in solid and constructive compositions and aggressive colors. In this article, I intend to explain what makes Suh’s art original and to elucidate it in relation to where the interest or emotion of the viewer comes from. I certainly hope that this article is a 'discreet' piece of writing that reveals the 'discreet charm of Suh's art', but, needless to say, it is the reader who decides whether my intention is achieved. Regardless of whether he intended it or not, it would be difficult to refute that the works, those that deal with the stories of Danjong in Korean history demonstrate the originality of Suh most prominently. His 'history paintings' are different both from the typical history paintings such as those by Jacques-Louis David in which the attitude is emphasized to accomplish historical missions whose importance was newly highlighted to the people at that time and from contemporary history paintings such as those of Leon Golub which deal overtly with the violence committed in today's reality. Though impossible in reality, let us imagine a place where a large number of conventional history paintings are shown together. In this place, Suh's series of history paintings would arrest one's attention with their bewildering images like the skeleton that suddenly appears in The Ambassadors by Holbein.1 In the passage of time flying as swift as an arrow, present reality scatters away at once into the past and becomes absent. When one can define history as the process of replacing reality with memories which so immediately enters into the state of absence, it can be said that history is also a kind of symbolic order. Yet the realities in the period of King Danjong's reign could not locate themselves within the official, symbolic order. For a while, the historical facts during the period had been documented under the title of 'Prince Nohsan's Diary' instead of under the category of authentic history. In the usual case, when a king passes away, the achievements of the king are supposed to be written in the official records of his life, and his tomb is to have a tomb journal and a map of the tomb, but in the case of Danjong, the official records of his doings during his lifetime were not documented at the time and even a formal tomb was not built for him.2 In the paintings of Suh, the incidents related to Danjong are revealed as the real that was deported from the symbolic order of official history and thus as a historical trauma which has been buried in the collective unconscious of Koreans as a traumatic memory. In addition to the description of Suh's paintings by the analogical use of Lacanian concepts, let us briefly examine the social implications of Suh's paintings. To borrow the idea of Louis Althusser, what I have called the symbolic order of the official history above is an ideology. It is quite overwhelming to see how long the ideology of the winner in history, which prevented Danjong from being registered in authentic history for a while, has continued its influence. How faithfully has such an ideology of the winner been reproduced in the TV dramas made by the mass media, which Althusser referred to as one of 'the ideological state apparatuses'. Suh puts on the brakes, in the dimension of the individual, on the perspective of the winner inculcated one-sidedly by the dramas produced by the ideological state apparatus.3 Needless to say, the incidents that occurred in relation to Danjong, especially the stories in which the Sayuksin (the Six Martyred Loyalists) and the Sangyuksin (the Six Loyalists who survived) were involved, might be reduced to an edification through which one of the features of Confucian ideology of loyalty is reinforced. As a matter of fact, it was through the reevaluation of the stories hidden behind authentic history and the improvement of historical remains that such kings of Joseon as Sukjong, Youngjo and Jeongjo strengthened their ruling ideologies.4 It is certain that such a feudal ideology of monarchy has become a relatively obsolete ideology whose opportuneness has been greatly weakened. The paintings of Suh are obviously different, however, from the propaganda paintings in which anachronistic ideas are lifelessly reiterated. Let us imagine that Suh's themes are depicted in the Classicist mode as in the nationalist paintings that were actively made under the military regimes in the past. Then, it is obvious that those paintings would look like practical paintings whose purpose lies in persuasion and instillation of ideology and which are thus somewhat unsatisfactory in terms of aesthetic qualities. But Suh employs an expressionistic mode for his works. This happens to remind one of Francis Bacon's variations of Velazquez's portrait of Pope Innocent X. Historical facts are transformed into the pains of individual beings involved in them. Thereby, “it can be said that my paintings are the improvisational and expressionist depictions of objective historical facts on the basis of my own subjective interpretations,” says Suh.5 The rhetoric of 'the individual,' which is also implied in the use of the subjective interpretation of historical facts, is much more fortified by the reference to his own body through the indexical sign of expressionistic brushstrokes. This is also another factor through which Suh's paintings are distinguished from those history paintings usually registered in the passage/genealogy of the Realist tradition with strong purposes subordinate to ideas or dogmas. On a method demonstrated by himself in the creation of a modernist painting which also possessed figurative elements, Bacon summarized in a phrase as follows: 'Try to make it resemblant. Yet only through a method that is accidental and is not resemblant.'6 According to Deleuze, the accidental marks and touches that a painter's hand leaves on the canvas continue to accumulate as they act as certain modes of action and choice. It is these marks and touches that transform a painting into a form that is recreated into a higher dimension by rescuing it from a simple composition that merely resembles the object to be painted. “First of all, I just make a line as I see it. When you make a wrong line, it is not wrong at all. Because that is a starting point. This line must perform a certain role when it meets another line,”7 says Suh, and in this remark is revealed a logic corresponding to that of Bacon on the image made through the accumulation of indexical line drawings. These expressionistic brushstrokes contribute to the disclosure of the condition of painting of two-dimensionality and its materiality in the course of modernization that painting took by pursuing its own nature. One can take the paintings of the CoBrA artists as an example of the representative works that intended to reveal the property of painting as material through violent brushstrokes. The works of such CoBrA artists as Karel Appel are characterized by their strong emphasis on the material attribute of painting and the maximization of the violence of the trace made by the artist in front of the pictorial surface. On the contrary, the paintings of Suh do not emphasize the material nature of painting as extremely as the CoBrA participants did, and they take a moderate course while using violent brushstrokes as a methodology to deliver the themes rather than for the purpose of violent, emotional extrusion. The way of Suh's brushwork resembles less the uncontrollable ejection of anarchism and nihilism than the powerful force which a master swordsman implicitly exhibited in his calligraphy, as exemplified by a figure in the film, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. In giving form to the sufferings of a human being, Francis Bacon employed a grotesque and almost bizarre, formal distortion as well as expressionistic brushwork. Deleuze analyzed that Bacon utilized deformation of forms in order to capture and depict the invisible force.8 On the contrary, Suh uses a very crude depiction of images to the extent that they look rather innocent. This stylistic feature extends the expressive potential of colors. He emphasizes the expressive possibility of lines and colors within the limited formal conditions that appear to be rigid while saying that “…It is only that the rich thought that is latent in it is not grasped by people. I do not think that the faces of the figures are blank. I admit it to the extent that the form of the painting contributes to their seeming blankness. But when one pays more attention to the lines and colors, the thoughts in the paintings cannot be explained only through rigid forms. The apparent, rigid parts are indeed conspicuous, but there are many stories in them. I believe that people can hear them someday.”9 To me, it seems that his emphasis on the potential of colors originates from his Oedipal impulse to overcome the modernist mode that the artists of the previous generation, as elder artists or teachers employed. This psychological intent of Suh can be backed up by his remark as follows: “As for the use of colors, I learned many things while I experienced the abstract art of Korea in the late 1970s and further while I thought over Eastern style painting in general. I think I read an article about White Monochrome Painting of the period and its relation to the white porcelains of Joseon. It seems that the art of Joseon utilized a limited scheme of colors. I believe that explains the underlying influence of such a sense on the present period of Korea. Also, I think that Joseon's sense of color has not improved in the consciousness of contemporary professional painters. I believe that the color culture of Korea should be newly established. Therefore, I needed to destroy the existing concept of color.”10 His urge to be liberated from the oppression of modernism that the standardized, modern urban space embodies is also revealed in his words, “In that excessive colors and brushstrokes can be used as tools to express the urge to cope with the suppressed, urban culture, expressionist painting is related to the densely clustered space of modern urban architecture.”11 In addition, it seems that his Oedipal impulse to surpass the father figures in the field of art underlies his repetition compulsion of a tenacious inquiry into history painting, which one seldom finds among contemporary painters, and this is also suggested in his words regarding the fact that his teachers participated in the production of nationalist paintings, “There is a curious connection among the facts that Korean minimalist painting emerged as the logical result of modernism, that documentary paintings whose purpose was to defend the state were produced, and that the Yushin Constitution, codifying the dictatorial powers held by President Park Chung Hee, was approved in the 1970s when Seoul was rapidly rebuilt as a modern, urban city.”12 It might be that the artists who were pursuing modernist abstraction as their own artistic aim, were psychologically traumatized by the forced circumstances in which they had to perform anachronistic, artistic activities of making nationalist paintings under government control. Did he not intend to discover a cure for the psychological trauma his artistic teachers might have suffered by attempting to make aesthetic accomplishments in his history paintings? The liberation of color was the artistic problem whose solution not only Suh but Bacon wanted to find.13 There is also a prominent difference as well as such a similarity shared by many contemporary artists. The paintings of Bacon, which frequently used the form of a triptych, were produced in a manner through which isolation and discontinuation are enumerated, as also emphasized by the form. This characterizes all of Bacon's paintings of the alienation and loneliness of modern people as well as his works in the formal frame of a triptych. In the paintings of Suh, on the contrary, although individual elements are separated two-dimensionally, they are reassembled within the interrelationship with one another so as to form the whole. It is due to this feature that Suh's works can be differentiated from the paintings of Neo-expressionists to which his works are often compared. Many critics have pointed out the influence of Neo-expressionism on the work of Suh by mentioning the restoration of figurativeness and narrative content, which were rejected by modernism, and the stylistic features of violent expression and intense colors.14 Suh does not deny the stylistic influence of Neo-expressionism.15 Crude and violent shapes and vivid colors are, however, clearly elements of an axis of the artistic tradition that has formed itself in the artistic climate of Korea exemplified by folk painting, Buddhist painting and mural paintings of Korea, and at the same time they are tools of a universal expressive attitude widely shared by a variety of human artistic creativities. Moreover, a comparison through individual works reveals much more definitively the originality of Suh's art, distinguishable from the art worlds of those contemporary expressionists. Let us compare Suh's work to that of Leon Golub, who was mentioned above as one of the contemporary history painters. Apart from the aspects that they employ the expressionist mode to deal with historical contents and that they interpellate the lives of people who did not attract the attention of the world in the marginal region of history into the visible realm by transferring them to the arena of representation, Suh and Golub share a very concrete similarity in that their frequent theme is 'interrogation'. In that it exposes the cold reality of violence that may be used somewhere in the world at this very moment, Golub's Interrogation is different from Suh's Interrogation which reflects upon the incidents that are distant from the present period to some extent. Also, there is a considerable difference in terms of subject matter and the form through which it is delivered. In the paintings of Golub, the background is almost eliminated and only the human beings are emphasized. In the works of Suh, however, the humans and the environment around them interact with each other as they compete with each other. Sometimes, buildings and spaces cut into the human figures, and at other times all these elements are jumbled up while overlapping one another. It seems that his interest in modernology is realized in his representation of modern buildings represented through the form of the grid or the infrastructure of the city.16 In other words, it seems that his paintings portray the remains of the archeological inquiry into the modern. In some paintings of his, furthermore, the figures of the present and the past are blended with the remains and architectural environments of the past and the present. When American Neo-expressionist Golub pays attention only to human figures while eliminating the background, in the works of Anselm Kiefer, a leading European Neo-expressionist, on the contrary, the human figures are absent, leaving only space behind. Since the works of Suh persistently hold fast to his interest in depicting human beings, Suh's work is greatly different from that of Kiefer despite the fact that both of them deal with the themes related to history in the expressionist manner. At the same time though, they correspond to each other in that they employ their own ways to put some sense of distance between their works and the viewers. The paintings of Kiefer create some tension between themselves and the viewers through the dialectic of absorption and estrangement. That is to say, Kiefer's works invite the viewers into the illusion of an enormous space and simultaneously they depict the empty and dilapidated space where human beings are absent and obtain a retrospective and reflective distance through affective effects. Suh's paintings attract the viewers through their intense narrativity attained through the depiction of the relationship between human beings and space, the stories in them and the powerful expression of colors. At the same time, the viewers are continuously driven away by the isolated figures without mutual gaze exchange and the synthetic and subjective reconstruction of the pictorial space whose emphasis is on two-dimensionality, and this allows them to gain a reflective distance. In regard to this, Suh explains, “Since the painted picture plane obtains its status as an object too, I think the simultaneous identification of it as a painted incident by emphasizing the two-dimensionality of the object secures the objective position of the viewers while preventing them from the blind acceptance of the content of the incident. In other words, while the viewers align their thoughts with the narrativity of the content depicted, their eyes are armed with some sense of distance with the help of the tension caused by two-dimensionality.”17 Meanwhile, the paintings of Georg Baselitz, an eminent painter who stands abreast of Kiefer, are differentiated from the works of Kiefer in that they concentrate less on space than on figures, objects, and their parts. Nonetheless, it is understood that the work of Kiefer pays its ultimate concentrated attention to visual symbols. In the long run, the works of both artists have something in common in that they place the focus on metonymical motifs or specific objects within the world. On the contrary, Suh's art is distinguished in the fact that it concerns the relationship that those objects and figures form with their surroundings and the interaction between them. In Suh's paintings, the pictorial space is structured to have multi-layered levels, and sometimes the sidewalk stands up and the wall lies down so that they intersect and are combined with each other. The horizontal, two-dimensional plane is expressed vertically or a vertical plane is depicted horizontally, and thus many different planes are densely entwined not in real space but in the space of thought restructured in the mind. This feature allows one to consider the paintings of Suh as an analogical model for text, since, according to Roland Barthes, the etymology of text is a woven textile.18 Therefore, “His picture plane is not a mere transparent mirror that reflects exterior reality. It exists as both a mediator through which a work and reality interact with each other in a 'chemical' way and an arena of Gestalt to structure the picture plane. Suh Yongsun unmistakably understands that the lively cultural conditions the 'breath of our lives' are netted in the perceptual materials of daily experience and in the pictorial apparatuses, methods and materials.”19 Means of public transportation, traffic signal systems such as signal lamps, various kinds of signs, advertisements and so on are some of the sign systems that constantly turn on and off while controlling and giving signals to human behavior and movements in the city. In the depiction of the modern city, Suh often crossed those signs and signal systems, and that strengthens the textual characteristic of his works. “While transferring the narrative function to the viewers, the artist removed anything but the minimum cognitive faculties from the image”, and these “small clues help the viewers to recompose historical situations and to activate the emotional movements in the formative qualities of the work.” In the end, the artist “does not explain such a result through descriptive forms and induces the viewers to interpret the image properly.”20 This quality as visual text is also manifested by the narrative complexity of the polyphonic unfolding of the stories expelled from official history through the polyfocal figures. The paintings of Suh as visual texts stimulate, therefore, a variety of interpretative actions and constantly extend the possibility to widen the ranges of their meanings. I have examined so far the factors that form and differentiate the artistic language of Suh in terms of themes and methodologies. At the same time, I tried to explain how contemporaneity comes out from the works in which the artist concentrates his artistic capacity on the very conventional mediums such as painting and sculpture. In fact, it can be said that the contemporaneous qualities of the visual languages the artist employs are mostly quite universal already. Nevertheless, the fact that he uses such considerably universalized visual languages does not greatly damage the peculiarity of the artistic world of the works. This is due to the fact that Suh does not ignore the close relationship between his themes and stylistic modes and the spatial and temporal environments around himself such as cultural and historical contexts. That is to say, it is because he produces his artistic results by applying the logic that he discovered through his tenacious inquiry into the close relationship of the spatial and temporal environments to those visual languages. Under the disarrayed circumstance of the contemporary art scene in which depthless and superficial artistic practices are rampant and step into the limelight, Suh has built his artistic realm through prudent and in-depth study and inquiry on the basis of humanistic research and retrospection into his themes, and this artistic attitude of Suh is not easily found in the contemporary art scene and thus set a good example for many artists. In this exhibition, Suh Yongsun, who does not let himself be swept along by the currents of the times and continues to ponder upon the authenticity of an artist, unfolds the moments of exceptional significance captured in his eyes in the long stretch of human history from the ancient to the present. The monumental panoramas of human history force one to cast grave and sincere reflection upon the meaning of human existence. *Source: Kim Kyoung-woon, “Suh Yongsun,” in Artist of the Year 2009: Suh Yongsun, exhibition catalogue (Gwacheon: National Museum of Contemporary Art, 2009), 13-23. This text has been edited for minor typographical corrections.