Eel kwon Kim: The New Landscape
Robert C. Morgan
Debra Drexler, Lost in Paris, oil on canvas, 72 x 95 in. Image courtesy of the artist.
The landscape has been a persistent theme in art for centuries. As a tradition in painting, it has been practiced in both Eastern and Western cultures for many centuries. Today the cultures are no longer so distant as they one were. In the current era of cultural globalization, a new kind of synthesis has evolved. Although each has its own specific character as to how to paint the landscape, the means by which new concepts and methods are considered and understood is more connected than ever before. There is less emphasis given to hierarchies in artistic expression and more attention to common goals. In such a climate the theme of the landscape takes on a new significance, not only as a purely representational or linguistic phenomenon, but as a neo-metaphysical phenomenon as well.
Here I refer specifically to the paintings of the Korean artist Eel Kwon Kim. To see these paintings, and to encapsulate their significance, is to go beyond the normative perception of how a landscape is seen or understand. Kim’s landscapes have a direct reference to abstract painting. They operate as a hinge between the two–representation and abstraction–as a fulcrum, a balance beam, a way of seeing into the future. Kim’s series, entitled "Calm :Land," constitutes a kind of prophetic seismograph, a warning without deliberate calculation, a way of thinking and feeling in relation to the self. Kim understands that viewing the landscape is an intrinsic metaphysical action, a way of coming to terms with the reality of nature, with the infinity of the horizon line, with the calmness of the self, the solitude, the infinite grandeur of spiritual being in a world torn apart by fear and greed.
Kim’s paintings constitute a kind of seeing that envisions the future in relation to the past–that sees the Eastern traditions of landscape painting as having a succinct calmness, a meaning without equivocation, a feeling of intrepid comprehension and contemplation. Here one may discover a universe of human emotion and an atmosphere of galaxies that reign over our feeling as we move through time and space.
As I wander through the gallery in search of a pivot, a grasp, a solace, where the rectitude of understanding might merge with the sensation of emotion, I come upon a painting, inscribed in Korean, with umber and ochre mixed into a black and white field, a horizon dividing a section of the land with a larger section of the sky. It is titled Calm Land (12.07.01). I think immediately of the series of last Rothko paintings that I saw initially at the Marlborough Galleries (at the recommendation of the painter Robert Motherwell) in 1970. Here in these galleries, these stark and simplistic paintings by Rothko were juxtaposed with the thinly attenuated figurations by Giacometti. But here at the Gallery Korea in New York I see a similar phenomenon, a painting that captures some of what I recall from more than thirty years earlier. The scale of Kim’s paintings is generally reduced, and the passage from representation to abstraction has taken a different course. The extravagant maneuver (which many never grasped) in Rothko is not the same as in the paintings of Eel Kwon Kim. Kim’s paintings are smaller, more delicate and in some ways more vibrant, more of their own accord, less desperate, less fraught with despair. Still, Kim’s paintings are somehow on the edge, on the verge of something–some event–about to happen, or maybe something that has just occurred. In each Kim’s "Calm Land" paintings there is the desire to come to terms with reality as a horizon, as land and sky, as a bifurcation., as a dialectical encounter with an unforeseen reality that touches upon the most basic, the most fundamental human experience: the emotions stirred in the perceiver in the act of being a work of art.
I look again–this time at another small abstract landscape, a painting that offers another kind of solace, entitled Calm Land (01.12.01). Kim tends to number the individual paintings rather than title them as if they were all part of a single combined unit of time and space, a matter of relativity, where the gravitational pull is also an ascendancy forever given back to the horizon of the Earth. The landscape has very little modulation, almost no sign of activity of the horizon; yet one is aware of the brush–the way the brush has defined the landscape, the land in relation to the sky. The blackness in the land and the mixture of mauve and yellow in the sky suggests that the light has gone down or is about to rise. There is the passage between darkness and lightness. There is a solemn stillness, an awakening, a transposition from one moment to the next. The sound is as apparent as the vision. Compared to a sister painting, Calm Land (11.27.00), there is the sense that the light has come into the sky and that the land is beckoning the events of the day. The spirit of motion, of travel, of taking part in the quotidian returns of the day are very much in evidence.
But there is no prediction in the direction these landscapes will take. In Calm Land (01.05.00), the sensation of ocean waves breaks through the night. The viewer is arbitrarily standing at the seaside watching this extravagant, though sublime phenomenon in nature. The horizon is disturbed. The brushstroke in its simple, recondite, and calligraphic manner interrupts the typical stillness. We are poised in front of the sea–yet still, not as a pure representation, but as a hint of something universal in nature. The effect is ultimately one of pulling together the representational and abstract elements in painting–both belonging to nature–in tune with one another. Eel Kwon Kim is tuning the perceivers eye to the sensation of the thing perceived, the role of nature as an objective variant, a crustacean form, a primeval event that takes us homeward into the self, into the vacant regions of the soul, where the transformation from dark to light emerges and we become whole again.
