The current debates over the rise of a global contemporary art have opened the doors to embracing specific practices and styles that originate from places far beyond the Euro-American sphere, as well as marginalized practices from the Western metropoles for example, the recent interest in craft practices such as weaving. Yet the claims for a genuine participation in the global contemporary often still remains trapped in a local or regional context. From East Asia (namely China, Japan and Korea) contemporary ink practice has been touted as the current manifestation of a long millennial tradition of ink practice originating in literati aesthetic traditions. Transhistorical exhibitions such as the Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2013 have been broadly positioned from this perspective. While acknowledging that the range of artistic practice in China is much broader, the curator Mike Hearn states that the show focuses on ‘the portion that seems to be meaningfully informed by China’s history of artistic traditions’. Although the arguments are sound and rightly position contemporary ink practice as a deserved inheritor of this millennial East Asian aesthetic style, it also opens up the possibility that artists whose work draws upon this tradition are only seen as recent reinterpreters or transcribers of this historical tradition. In this sense, the stress on historical continuity traps commentary on a particular artist within a regional or geographic contemporary.
For Minjung Kim, whose practice is often seen as a distillation of ink traditions and European painting practice, this subtle shift in seeing her work as not merely a transcriber of East Asian tradition can be illuminating. The artist apprenticed under an ink master and a watercolorist from when she was six years old. Her family’s origins are in Gwangju, Korea, where the old literati traditions were continued but at the same time, the birthplace of the struggle for a new contemporary artistic language and ethos. The Minjung Art movement in the 1980s was aligned to the new emergent democratic Korea. Yet if we look closely at her artistic production over time, her early works in Korea were dominated by representational work in landscapes, and calligraphy. It was only after she moved to Italy and attended the Brera Academy of Fine Art in Milan, that we begin to see the forms and styles that we are familiar with today. The suggestion here is that it may be productive to see Kim’s work also in terms of abstract art forms and practice. From the outset, we should view abstraction as a global practice which manifests itself in multiple localities and more importantly derives its specific characteristics through its interaction with other local and regional practices and philosophies.
Minjung Kim’s artistic practice can thus be seen as a process of extending the possibilities of contemporary abstraction by a distillation or absorption of East Asian literati traditions. These encounters transform the basis of her distinctive abstract forms in ways far beyond that of the Western ideal. While post war conceptualism in the West prioritized artistic concept rather than form as the defining feature of an artwork, Kim’s practice gives space and weight to the interaction of the materials of her art practice as an equal ‘creator’ of her works. Her practice uses a very limited range of materials- ink, water, paper, glue and fire to create an astonishing range of work of varying tonal ranges, shapes, textures and emotional pitches.
An appreciation of Minjung’s sensitivity and deep knowledge of how wet ink interacts in complex ways with the traditional mulberry Hanji paper that she uses is illuminating in this instance. As an artist she sets up an encounter between ink and paper, anticipating but not completely controlling the way her various grades of paper absorb the ink washes that she applies. Each work, therefore, is a product of a level of unpredictability, producing the nuanced and sophisticated ink forms that we see in her work. Her practice can be seen almost like a fractal, where a limited group of materials work together in a staged encounter to produce an extraordinary range of visual forms and shades.
The current debates over the rise of a global contemporary art have opened the doors to embracing specific practices and styles that originate from places far beyond the Euro-American sphere, as well as marginalized practices from the Western metropoles for example, the recent interest in craft practices such as weaving. Yet the claims for a genuine participation in the global contemporary often still remains trapped in a local or regional context. From East Asia (namely China, Japan and Korea) contemporary ink practice has been touted as the current manifestation of a long millennial tradition of ink practice originating in literati aesthetic traditions. Transhistorical exhibitions such as the Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2013 have been broadly positioned from this perspective. While acknowledging that the range of artistic practice in China is much broader, the curator Mike Hearn states that the show focuses on ‘the portion that seems to be meaningfully informed by China’s history of artistic traditions’. Although the arguments are sound and rightly position contemporary ink practice as a deserved inheritor of this millennial East Asian aesthetic style, it also opens up the possibility that artists whose work draws upon this tradition are only seen as recent reinterpreters or transcribers of this historical tradition. In this sense, the stress on historical continuity traps commentary on a particular artist within a regional or geographic contemporary.
For Minjung Kim, whose practice is often seen as a distillation of ink traditions and European painting practice, this subtle shift in seeing her work as not merely a transcriber of East Asian tradition can be illuminating. The artist apprenticed under an ink master and a watercolorist from when she was six years old. Her family’s origins are in Gwangju, Korea, where the old literati traditions were continued but at the same time, the birthplace of the struggle for a new contemporary artistic language and ethos. The Minjung Art movement in the 1980s was aligned to the new emergent democratic Korea. Yet if we look closely at her artistic production over time, her early works in Korea were dominated by representational work in landscapes, and calligraphy. It was only after she moved to Italy and attended the Brera Academy of Fine Art in Milan, that we begin to see the forms and styles that we are familiar with today. The suggestion here is that it may be productive to see Kim’s work also in terms of abstract art forms and practice. From the outset, we should view abstraction as a global practice which manifests itself in multiple localities and more importantly derives its specific characteristics through its interaction with other local and regional practices and philosophies.
Minjung Kim’s artistic practice can thus be seen as a process of extending the possibilities of contemporary abstraction by a distillation or absorption of East Asian literati traditions. These encounters transform the basis of her distinctive abstract forms in ways far beyond that of the Western ideal. While post war conceptualism in the West prioritized artistic concept rather than form as the defining feature of an artwork, Kim’s practice gives space and weight to the interaction of the materials of her art practice as an equal ‘creator’ of her works. Her practice uses a very limited range of materials- ink, water, paper, glue and fire to create an astonishing range of work of varying tonal ranges, shapes, textures and emotional pitches.
An appreciation of Minjung’s sensitivity and deep knowledge of how wet ink interacts in complex ways with the traditional mulberry Hanji paper that she uses is illuminating in this instance. As an artist she sets up an encounter between ink and paper, anticipating but not completely controlling the way her various grades of paper absorb the ink washes that she applies. Each work, therefore, is a product of a level of unpredictability, producing the nuanced and sophisticated ink forms that we see in her work. Her practice can be seen almost like a fractal, where a limited group of materials work together in a staged encounter to produce an extraordinary range of visual forms and shades.
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