Lee Kang-So and Choi Byung-So In Conversation with Ines Min
Korean artists Choi Byung-So and Lee Kang-So are holding simultaneous solo exhibitions at the Musée d’art moderne de Saint-Étienne Métropole, on view through to 16 October 2016. Though their names are most commonly associated with Dansaekhwa, the artists maintain distinct styles that situate their practices outside of the monochromatic painting movement.
The two played instrumental roles in the burgeoning scene of experimental art in 1970s Korea, when the avant-garde was pitted against Park Chung-hee’s dictatorial regime. Choi and Lee helped establish the Daegu Contemporary Art Festival in 1974.
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Lee took inspiration from Dadaist happenings, executing poignant performances in the early seventies that would become some of his best-known work. At the 9th Paris Biennale he turned heads with Untitled-75031, in which he scattered chalk across the gallery floor and tied a chicken to a central post; it was left to leave its footprints across the space.
Since then, his investigations into the potential of images have journeyed from installation to video to paintings of acrylic on canvas. Many of his paintings feature recurring motifs of ducks, boats and deer. However in recent years those silhouettes have become pared down with minimal use of line. He is driven by Confucian and Buddhist principles, and a desire to capture fleeting moments of life.
In this interview, the artists discuss their relationship to Dansaekhwa, and the role of Daegu, their shared hometown, in the Seoul-centric world of contemporary Korean art.
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IM: Through minimal gestures, elements of the everyday become key to your work. Why is this connection to the real important to you?
LKS: In 1973 I received my first invitation for a solo show at the Myeongdong Gallery in Seoul. For the exhibition I moved in furniture (tables and chairs) from an old dive bar in the city, and for a week I served alcohol to visitors exactly like you would in a bar. The audience was able to experience a variety of situations, some thinking the gallery had actually become a bar, others understanding it as art, enjoying the alcohol and conversation. I even visited on occasion and was able to experience it as a visitor myself.
The idea behind the work was that the tables and chairs had taken on tremendous form, filled with the lives of the owner and patrons of the bar. From the surfaces of the wood-paneled tables and chairs I felt like I could see and hear the countless scratches and burns from cigarettes and hot pans, rags cleaning them until they shined like curios, visual and auditory hallucinations like silent screams. This is a world that cannot exist even though it wants to exist. For it to exist something must stop, but everything is moving and even my mind is ceaselessly changing and every particle is in flux. The dive bar piece was sharing that experience. Even I am but a fluctuating visitor.
This hallucinatory experience, as a reflection of everything in my mind, cannot help but be uncertain. No matter how much one calls for analytical and rational thinking, it cannot bring about certainty. In Zisi’s Doctrine of the Mean, there is a line that says something along the lines of, ‘Although the human mind has an clear ontological aspect and an aspect of the concrete from the real world, this is but one state’.
I’m more interested in the possibility of realising the ilhoek [‘one stroke’ or ‘holistic stroke’, an idea from Qing Dynasty painter Shitao that the meaning of 10,000 strokes can be achieved in one] in a balanced state that’s at least a little bit closer to ‘sincerity’, rather than expressing the joy, anger, sorrow, and happiness revealed in the everyday of human nature. So even though I know it’s a futile endeavor, I keep trying in my work.
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