Inkie WHANG, Savina Museum of Contemporary Art
Birth
1951, Chungju
Genre
Painting, Installation
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Inkie WHANG's Solo Exhibition_curated by Jae Hyun KANG
Hwang Inkie reinterprets scenes of nature around him or traditional Korean landscape paintings and reconstructs them with modern means to create a new form of landscape painting which he dubbed "digital landscape." In so doing, he has earned a reputation as an artist at the confluence of the East and the West, and tradition and modernity. Having experienced the cultures of Korea and the US, studied applied physics and fine art, and experienced directly opposing traditional and counter-cultures, Hwang describes his artistic tendency as a mix of different cultures and multiple values. The artist’s extensive and varied experience has allowed him to reflect both values inherent to nature and results of cool-headed analysis of the structure of the real world in his painting quite freely. This is entirely in keeping with his never missing the latest trends in the global art world while living close to nature.
Inkie HWANG's 'Digital Landscape,' Contemporaneity of Traditional Landscape
Hwang Inkie reinterprets scenes of nature around him or traditional Korean landscape paintings and reconstructs them with modern means to create a new form of landscape painting which he dubbed "digital landscape." In so doing, he has earned a reputation as an artist at the confluence of the East and the West, and tradition and modernity. Having experienced the cultures of Korea and the US, studied applied physics and fine art, and experienced directly opposing traditional and counter-cultures, Hwang describes his artistic tendency as a mix of different cultures and multiple values. The artist’s extensive and varied experience has allowed him to reflect both values inherent to nature and results of cool-headed analysis of the structure of the real world in his painting quite freely. This is entirely in keeping with his never missing the latest trends in the global art world while living close to nature.
We can see that Hwang has always been interested in things about nature by simply looking at the titles of his works shown to the public such as One Round Sweep, Like a Breeze, A Breeze over Troubled Water, and An Old Breeze. Hwang returned to Seoul from New York in 1986, and in 1996, he moved to a country village called Okcheon in Chungcheongbuk-do Province. He has lived and worked there ever since. For this reason, his work is related to his journey away from artificial relationships or systems or social relations.
Hwang's interest in nature does not spring from nostalgia about nature being forgotten in a secularized society. Rather, he approaches nature as a frame that constitutes the world and as unchanging values in the world and demonstrates nature once revered for its spiritual characteristics in the past with perspectives from the present. Hwang scans original images of well-known traditional literati paintings, deconstructs the images into pixel-like forms and then converts them into dots that serve as a blueprint upon which he recreates a giant mosaic-like work. When selecting images to be used for blueprint for his works, Hwang does not discriminate between traditional landscapes and real landscapes, because he is not interested in the form of art to reproduce nature, but instead in the method in which landscape painters of different periods depicted natural landscapes of that time.
One Round Sweep (1995) depicts a 360-degree view of Mt. Bakhansan National Park near the artist's studio in Seoul with a collage of objets and drawings, and Outing (1997) painted in ink with calligraphy depicts natural scenery of the artist's studio in Okcheon, Chungcheongbuk-do Province. Both are in the style of a long roll of paper unfolding to the right and left, and they are reminiscent of traditional Korean landscape painting. Although the form was borrowed from traditional Korean painting, these pieces also reveal Hwang's perception about the natural scenery that surrounds him. Western landscape painting originated as a kind of legalistic documentary painting to prove ownership of land. It did not evolve into the picturesque representation of land until the 18th century. Oriental landscape painting, on the other hand, expresses a kind of self-cultivation and deeper meditation aspiring to keep the ideal called nature nearby. Unlike Western landscape painting, which objectified nature and reproduced it on canvas, traditional Korean painting narrates stories as if they were flowing with the narrator seemingly coming in and going out of the landscape.
Hwang brings out such characteristics of traditional Korean landscape even more strongly by modern means, as can be seen on Nice Breeze Day (1997), through which Hwang reconstructed the scenery around his studio with metal. On a huge ten-meter-long panel, he created this mosaic-like work by attaching thousands of small rivets and washers at an angle. Looking closely at this piece, you can see that the rivets and washers protruding from the two-dimensional canvas are indeed metal, and looking at it from a distance, you can see the whole view created by differences in the concentrations of rivets at a glance. The washers attached over rivets reflect line and make the work sparkle with even only slight small movements, causing the response to air flow of the space and light to change. And such changes cause the surface of the work to interact with the space of the display area. This way, the artist invites the viewers to experience changes in viewpoint. This characterizes traditional Korean landscape in that it gives the impression of looking at a landscape from a distance or even walking through a valley. Like traditional Korean painting which gives the subject more freedom by leaving some space blank and expands the subject outside canvas and eventually leads the viewers into a journey through nature, Hwang lets the viewers experience a space in nature using a two-dimensional canvas as a medium as they move along the painting.
At times, Hwang brings together landscapes of different periods of history into the same piece. He restructured the Muigugok-do Painting of the Nine-Bend Stream of Wuyi Mountains, a landscape painting of the Joseon period, on a glass window through which the outside view is clearly reflected with silicon bits and acrylic mirror pieces. This piece was presented at the Venice Biennale in 2003. The pixilated traditional Korean landscape painting shows an actual landscape outside the glass window as its background. As such, the real landscape and the landscape in absence exist separately and yet are combined together. This kind of communication can be associated with the phenomenological experience of minimalist sculpture, and we can see Hwang's landscape in the context of Western modernism. After all, by inducing viewers to have synaesthetic experience transcending two-dimensions and three-dimensions based on the perspective of traditional Korean landscape on nature, Hwang intends to blur the boundary of formal media such as painting and sculpture as defined by the history of Western art.
Since 2000, Hwang has borrowed traditional Chinese landscape in addition to traditional Korean landscape, not to mention nature around him, and converted them into digitalized images. In this digitalizing process, nature and traditional landscape paintings are converted into contemporary visual images represented by 0 and 1, which enables him to adjust the sizes of images and the density of pixels quite freely. Hwang presented Like a Breeze, a 28-meter-long mural, at the Venice Biennale in 2003. In Atlanta in 2004, he installed A Breeze over Troubled Water, in the entire exhibition hall of an art school gallery. This work is a scene of a Buddhist painting by Lee Jajang from the end of the Joseon period titled Eighteen Arhats made 144 times larger. The landscape images containing each and every aspect of nature are of superhuman scale, and this was made possible by the ease of reproduction and modification of digital imagery. Ironically, however, Hwang's digital landscape requires physical labor equally as much as traditional work methods as the process of attaching thousands of bits is extremely labor-intensive and time consuming. If painting is seen as a physical activity by the hands of an artist, Hwang's digital landscape can also be considered as painting as it also fills a two-dimensional canvas. In particular, if painting is characterized as a work to fill a square frame without limit on the use of the pigment and brush, Hwang’s filling the canvas by attaching bits to every pixel to constitute a real landscape or traditional Korean landscape can be regarded as painting. Also, Hwang converts non-material digital imagery characterized by desomatization by an elaborate process which requires intensive labor. By doing so, Hwang gives painterly value to what would otherwise be sterile digital imagery.
By borrowing traditional landscape paintings, Hwang's digital landscape reflects the function of painting as a means of recording and the meaning of narrative, while converting the original images into dots. In the process of scanning, pixelating, and converting into dots, Hwang's landscape condenses in an instance the time, space, and symbolism in which the original nature and traditional landscape paintings existed. This links tradition and turns it over by a new means of expression. Hwang first deconstructs landscape images into pixel-like forms and then recomposes them with starkly contrasting colors and materials, such as crystals, rivets, Legos and silicon, which are products of the extremely industrial society of today. By rendering landscape by a new medium in a way that unique painting styles came into use for traditional paintings through the ages, landscape from traditional painting is realized through properties of the present. He uses materials like crystal bits that imitate the shine of diamonds, Legos that reproduce the look of the world in a simple way in block units, acrylic mirrors that have the reflective properties of glass in plastic, and silicon which is an element that is in between liquid and solid. All of these materials are cheap, everyday things, which allows unlimited use. Thus, this is a form that suits a blueprint, which is to say that copies can be made indefinitely. This form re-defines the characteristics of painting, which has been defined by pigment, and acquires the contemporaneity of our times, while making the medium Hwang selected appropriate.
Hwang shows his interest in nature by using conflicting images. His early work, One Round Sweep (1997), and A Breeze over Troubled Water (2004) employed contemporary visual sensibilities by using billboards. Real landscape painting and the Buddhist painting Eighteen Arhats were reconstructed with rivets and dollops of silicon on huge billboards. The symbol representing desire of reality, which is overlapped by a symbol of religion, maximizes the concept of moment and continuation by juxtaposing the zeitlichkeit (temporality) of each one, rather than the conflicting consumerism and values of religious spirit. In the same context with these are the works presented at the exhibition titled Today That Will Be Yesterday by Tomorrow. The exhibition featured pieces in which news photos on social issues such as famine and war were reconstructed with Legos and an installation which showed the decay of the Ferrari emblem. Through this exhibition, Hwang materialized zeitlichkeit which is mixed with the processes of flowing of times of contemporaries. Besides, he reconstructed masterpiece still-lifes by Cezanne and Van Gogh with Legos. He expanded perspectives to look at the world in many ways by mixing backgrounds of different visual traditions including zeitlichkeit.
In providing explanation about the subject of his work, that is, nature, Hwang says, "it is like budding rice seeds and transplanting rice seedlings to a rice paddy, weeding and growing them with sun and water, and harvesting them…….. this is a kind of a rule, something invisible but definitely there." The artist aspires to reveal values of nature by bringing the reproduction of nature, which exists but cannot be measured, to the present. Painting of contemporary art, which has leaned on modernist painting, which defined itself as two-dimensions by giving up the depth of three-dimensions and illusions, is now seeking once again potential for contemporary painting by yielding its position and role to photography and digital image. In this regard, Hwang is seeking new existential values of painting since modernist painting through landscape painting with Oriental perspective on which his identity is based in the context of modern art originated from Western art. Through digital landscape, Hwang brings together different values: tradition and modernity, East and West, and digital and analogue. By relocating contents and forms, Hwang is posing a question about the essence of the contemporary, such as painting in contemporary art, succession of tradition to suit modernity, and fusion of Western and Oriental arts, here and now.
Yunju Chang (Curator)
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There/Then and Here/Now
1.
Whang Inkie, a painter well-known for his digital landscapes, presents his new works which announce the extension and change of his art in the exhibition titled Today That Will Be Yesterday by Tomorrow. The works on display include his digital renderings of not only traditional landscapes but also Cezanne’s still lifes with apples and press photographs. They are distinguished, above all, by the artist’s use of plastic Lego blocks as the primary medium. With the blocks’ structural and repetitive system, various vivid colors and luster on the polished plastic, Whang succeeded in imparting new and unusual meanings and plastic richness to East Asian landscape painting, Western still-life oil painting and on-the-spot photojournalism.
Whang Inkie, a painter well-known for his digital landscapes, presents his new works which announce the extension and change of his art in the exhibition titled Today That Will Be Yesterday by Tomorrow. The works on display include his digital renderings of not only traditional landscapes but also Cezanne’s still lifes with apples and press photographs. They are distinguished, above all, by the artist’s use of plastic Lego blocks as the primary medium. With the blocks’ structural and repetitive system, various vivid colors and luster on the polished plastic, Whang succeeded in imparting new and unusual meanings and plastic richness to East Asian landscape painting, Western still-life oil painting and on-the-spot photojournalism.
These new works including a Lego-landscape titled An Old Breeze, the Lego-still life series, “Pla Cezanne,” and the Lego-reportage photography series “Pla Child” show above all that the artist is broadening his spectrum of themes, aesthetics, methodologies and media by paying attention to the reality of his own time, as well as by making art-historical references to traditional Asian landscapes and Western masterpieces.
His artistic will to dismantle the dichotomy between spirit and matter, nature and civilization, and tradition and modernity, crossing over the binary demarcation between East and West, and past and present is a reflection of his critical thinking about the identity of an artist living in today’s hybrid culture. The problem of identity is one of the biggest issues among artists in the global age who work with nomadic sentiments and the cosmopolitan spirit, not to mention among diaspora artists including Korean-American ones. As confirmed by his own words, “I do not despair or think that the mixture of two different cultures in the development of my sensibilities was destructive. I would rather like to think of this as a progressive chaos that enabled tolerance” (excerpt from the essay for the exhibition catalogue, “American Debut, Inkie Whang,” Frey Norris Gallery, 2008, p.1.), the issue must have been a serious and unavoidable challenge or task for Whang too who experienced living abroad in the U.S. after his family immigrated to the country.
2.
While studying in the U.S., Whang began to learn Asian landscape painting due to his deep interest in and insight into his roots and origin, and after coming back to Korea in 1986, he set out to develop his own style of landscape painting. For example, One Round Sweep presented in his 1994 solo exhibition at Kumho Museum of Art, Seoul, was a real-view landscape of the 360 degree view which he saw from atop Mt.Bukhan near Hongji-dong where his home is located. Surrounding the walls of the exhibition space, this panoramic landscape required the audience too to walk around to appreciate the whole image. It was marked by various objects such as barbed-wire entanglements and cones protruding from the free black-and-white drawing of the physical features of the mountain; and, as if to give a visual balance to the drawing, rivets and Lego blocks, which would become the artist’s main medium for the future, formed rigid structures on the surface of it. A similar type of a huge, epic landscape appeared in the “Artist of the Year 1997” exhibition at the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Gwacheon. Whang represented the scenery of Sojeong-ri, Okcheon, to which he had moved in the last year, using diverse media including drawing, painting, object, installation, etc. For this extraordinary array of all kinds of formal experiments, he even drove a hundred thousand rivets into it, which, however, led him an unexpected consequence: he threw his back out severely due to excessive labor and was obliged to work out a new methodology?‘digital landscape.’
While studying in the U.S., Whang began to learn Asian landscape painting due to his deep interest in and insight into his roots and origin, and after coming back to Korea in 1986, he set out to develop his own style of landscape painting. For example, One Round Sweep presented in his 1994 solo exhibition at Kumho Museum of Art, Seoul, was a real-view landscape of the 360 degree view which he saw from atop Mt.Bukhan near Hongji-dong where his home is located. Surrounding the walls of the exhibition space, this panoramic landscape required the audience too to walk around to appreciate the whole image. It was marked by various objects such as barbed-wire entanglements and cones protruding from the free black-and-white drawing of the physical features of the mountain; and, as if to give a visual balance to the drawing, rivets and Lego blocks, which would become the artist’s main medium for the future, formed rigid structures on the surface of it. A similar type of a huge, epic landscape appeared in the “Artist of the Year 1997” exhibition at the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Gwacheon. Whang represented the scenery of Sojeong-ri, Okcheon, to which he had moved in the last year, using diverse media including drawing, painting, object, installation, etc. For this extraordinary array of all kinds of formal experiments, he even drove a hundred thousand rivets into it, which, however, led him an unexpected consequence: he threw his back out severely due to excessive labor and was obliged to work out a new methodology?‘digital landscape.’
But, contrary to expectation, this new method also turned out to entail a lot of work and complex processes. He converted the film image of a traditional landscape painting into computer pixels and then attached a rivet, a piece of mirror or crystal, or a Lego block or shot silicon into each single dot of the image. The more an original painting was enlarged, the more work it would take. Some of the first digital landscapes were presented in his 2000 solo exhibition at Gallery Ihn, Seoul, since which the artist has successively produced and exhibited a series of supersized landscapes in the style.
At the Korean Pavilion for the 2003 Venice Biennale, Whang installed Like a Breeze, a 2.4 meter high and 28 meter long wall painting of a fifty times enlargement of Muigugok-do (Painting of the Nine-Bend stream of Wuyi Mountains) by a Joseon Dynasty painter Lee Seonggil, which consisted of one hundred thirty thousand mirror pieces of 12 millimeters long and wide and sixty thousand silicon darts of the same size. Another installation A Breeze over Troubled Water which encompassed the whole exhibition space when it was shown at Atlanta College of Art Gallery, Atlanta, 2004, was an one hundred forty four times magnified version of The Eighteen Arhats, a Buddhist painting by a late Joseon Dynasty artist Lee Jajang, using seven hundred thousand darts. Among “Mongyu,” a series of four pieces, presented at Gallery Ihn, 2007, Whang’s reinterpretation of Mongyudowon-do (A Dream Journey to the Peach Blossom Land) by An Gyeon, a court painter of the early Joseon Dynasty, the longest one was 8.5 meter long. And An Old Breeze which will be shown in this exhibition at ARKO Museum, produced based on Fishing Village in Light Snow by Wang Shen, a painter in the Song Dynasty, is also a large scale painting of 3 meter long and 7 meter wide.
Then, what does size mean to the artist? As One Round Sweep or his landscape of Sojeong-ri was too huge to be regarded as a painting or an object art, his subsequent series of digital landscape could be scaled up almost infinitely by computer processing. They seem to submerge the audience into the picture plane and thereby make possible the inter-subjective exchange between subject and object or phenomenological communication. The audience’s phenomenological perception involves the transition of the way of seeing from sight to synesthesia, which is effectively reinforced by the physical tactility of the pixel constituents, that is, such materials as rivets, crystal, silicon and Lego blocks, as well as by the luster of crystal or the plastic blocks, which ironically and simultaneously immaterializes the very tactility. As video provides tactile and mosaic images lying between two- and three- dimensions because its electronic particles are immaterialized into light, Whang’s digital landscapes elicit the audience’s tactile response through material pixels and immaterial gloss and so accomplish perceptual communication.
3.
Lego-landscapes are distinguished from rivet-, crystal-, or silicone- landscapes in that the former creates an ‘all-over’ composition in which plastic blocks are evenly attached in all regions regardless of the distinction between figure and ground, while in the latter, figures are represented on a neutral ground. Serving as pixels, these blocks realize and repeat a structural, numerical and digital process. This is why they are the most advanced medium for digital landscape.
Lego-landscapes are distinguished from rivet-, crystal-, or silicone- landscapes in that the former creates an ‘all-over’ composition in which plastic blocks are evenly attached in all regions regardless of the distinction between figure and ground, while in the latter, figures are represented on a neutral ground. Serving as pixels, these blocks realize and repeat a structural, numerical and digital process. This is why they are the most advanced medium for digital landscape.
An Old Breeze is the epitome of digital landscapes in that it maximizes the effects of the systemic structure, surface gloss and bright colors of Lego blocks. Unlike rivet-, crystal-, or silicon landscapes in which figures are depicted in complementary colors on a black, white, or monochrome background, or unlike even the previous type of Lego-landscapes which were composed of Lego blocks of only two colors such as black and white or yellow and black, the colorfulness of An Old Breeze evokes an entirely new atmosphere different from that of traditional black and white landscape. This color Lego-landscape looks quite antique and fantastic as if a digital colorization or an oil painting version of an ancient Chinese landscape, or a colorized black-and-white movie. On the other hand, however, its plastic texture and systematic structure reflect the modern aesthetic sense, arousing trans-temporal and ambivalent double emotion in which past and present, classic and modern aesthetics coexist and collide.
The “Pla Cezanne” series, remakes of Cezanne’s still life painting using Lego blocks, demonstrates the possibility of the blocks as a medium in another level and further the potentiality of digital aesthetics. Through this digital landscape which associates the blocks’ structural property with Cezanne’s structural principle, Whang not only succeeds to this French artist’s anxieties about painting, but also submits one solution to them by referring to the digital. If Cezanne’s Cubist methodology based on plural viewpoints aimed to express a sense of space or substance with cubes, rather than with foreshortening or perspective, “Pla Cezanne” uses Lego’s regular module and texture for the same purpose, pushing this further by piling the blocks up to form reliefs in some parts. “Pla Cezanne” reflects the mathematical and logical sensibilities which are commonly found in Cezanne’s non-perspectival cubes, Lego’s Minimalist repetitive structure and digital binary processing on the one hand and on the other, holds good as a comment upon the digital reproduction technology of copying, quoting and appropriating masterpiece paintings, plastic manufacturing capable of infinite reproduction as in digital production and contemporary simulation culture defined by its digital or plastic modeling.
4.
The Lego-reportage photography series, “Pla Child,” suggests that the artist’s interest is extending from past to present, and from art-historical reference to non-art events. He accuses our present material civilization of its tragic, violent side by remaking news photographs of an inspection of the scene of a sexual assault (Pla Child-Kim Sucheol), African children suffering from illness and disease (Pla Child-Africa), a girl bleeding and dying in the battlefield of the Iraq War (Pla Child- the Iraq War), etc.
Another dark side of modern material civilization is the evils of consumerism. There are many works in his studio which he produced out of the hallmark of consumerism, that is, luxury brands such as Louis Vuitton, Rolex, etc. Among them, Ferrari, presented in this exhibition, is a painting of the letters “Ferrari” inscribed on a background of dark brown dough of milk, soybeans, eggs and bananas. It is also a work of process art in itself because it left itself affected by cracks and mildew which would appear as the protein in the dough underwent putrefaction over time. A half-naked woman posing in Playboy magazine was also made into a work of art by him in the same way, but this time with a timer?an indicator of the passing of time? stuck to it. As if to remonstrate with consumer culture, Whang gives trendy goods or a female nude not splendor but dustiness, not permanence but temporariness which corrodes and vanishes with time.
The Lego-reportage photography series, “Pla Child,” suggests that the artist’s interest is extending from past to present, and from art-historical reference to non-art events. He accuses our present material civilization of its tragic, violent side by remaking news photographs of an inspection of the scene of a sexual assault (Pla Child-Kim Sucheol), African children suffering from illness and disease (Pla Child-Africa), a girl bleeding and dying in the battlefield of the Iraq War (Pla Child- the Iraq War), etc.
Another dark side of modern material civilization is the evils of consumerism. There are many works in his studio which he produced out of the hallmark of consumerism, that is, luxury brands such as Louis Vuitton, Rolex, etc. Among them, Ferrari, presented in this exhibition, is a painting of the letters “Ferrari” inscribed on a background of dark brown dough of milk, soybeans, eggs and bananas. It is also a work of process art in itself because it left itself affected by cracks and mildew which would appear as the protein in the dough underwent putrefaction over time. A half-naked woman posing in Playboy magazine was also made into a work of art by him in the same way, but this time with a timer?an indicator of the passing of time? stuck to it. As if to remonstrate with consumer culture, Whang gives trendy goods or a female nude not splendor but dustiness, not permanence but temporariness which corrodes and vanishes with time.
Like news photographs, luxury goods and female nudes are among the recurring subjects of Pop Art. It may seem strange that they were chosen by Whang, an artist well known for his unique style of landscape, but he in fact already appropriated advertisements in some parts of his landscape paintings when he had a solo show at National Museum of Contemporary Art, Gwacheon, 1997. And in A Breeze over Troubled Water, shown at Atlanta College of Art Gallery, 2004, he more actively incorporated advertising images into his art. He used a photographic image displayed on a subway advertising light box as the background of his painting of Arhats which were remade with seven hundred thousand red silicon darts. He invited these Buddha’s disciples in an ancient painting for glamorous male and female models in advertisement as if trying to heal the troubled water with a gentle breeze. The uproarious banquet of models and Buddhist saints placed in juxtaposition with one another offers an arena in which past and present, the classic and the modern, traditional landscape painting and Pop art are mixed and melted together, generating the hybrid, ambivalent aesthetics.
5.
Ambivalence is not only an aesthetic product of Whang’s natural disposition and formal training, but also a reflection of the double identity of a cosmopolitan artist living today, or an individual who had experiences of being alienated from others while spending his youth in the U.S. From the time when he stayed in New York, Whang worked with abstract painting in a Minimalist hard-edge style at the same time with gestural, spontaneous drawing. On the other hand, he also attempted to paint bold Abstract Expressionist pictures, while making abstract linear drawings by unraveling threads from the edge of linen or delineating the threads in color inks. The act of pulling out or coloring fine threads one by one reminds you of his manual work of filling the countless pixels in digital landscape. Among the works produced in this period, his scroll paintings, which require you to unfold the roll of paper or canvas to appreciate it, are a field of plastic experiments such as bold brush strokes, delicate line drawings and sometimes, cuts and holes, anticipating One Round Sweep.
Ambivalence is not only an aesthetic product of Whang’s natural disposition and formal training, but also a reflection of the double identity of a cosmopolitan artist living today, or an individual who had experiences of being alienated from others while spending his youth in the U.S. From the time when he stayed in New York, Whang worked with abstract painting in a Minimalist hard-edge style at the same time with gestural, spontaneous drawing. On the other hand, he also attempted to paint bold Abstract Expressionist pictures, while making abstract linear drawings by unraveling threads from the edge of linen or delineating the threads in color inks. The act of pulling out or coloring fine threads one by one reminds you of his manual work of filling the countless pixels in digital landscape. Among the works produced in this period, his scroll paintings, which require you to unfold the roll of paper or canvas to appreciate it, are a field of plastic experiments such as bold brush strokes, delicate line drawings and sometimes, cuts and holes, anticipating One Round Sweep.
Around 1986 when he came back to Korea, he began to create finger paintings. This?when you paint with fingers, you naturally get on the rhythm of your body, carrying gestural drawing to extremes? helped Whang to free himself from the problem of self-identity by encouraging him to paint driven by his disposition and temperament, not by themes and concepts. This also brought him to literati style landscape painting, which he developed into real-view landscape in his own style as he was fascinated by the beautiful scenery around his studio in Seoul or Paju. On the other hand, he was equally devoted to experimenting with structural, symbolic, analytic and conceptual works, which resulted in the alchemistical series of “Honeycomb.” The works in these two different styles were open to the public at Gallery Hyundai, Seoul, 1990 and two year later, the “Honeycomb” series was shown at Gallery Jung and landscape paintings at Gallery Forum.
Thus, Whang worked in the two opposite ways in a same period: one is analytic, formalist and constructivist and the other is emotional, intuitional and expressionistic. They could be respectively interpreted as an impact of Western art education on him and an expression of his inherent Oriental sensibilities. What should be noted here is that the artist ultimately was to melt the two contradictory currents into a work, or a unitary body. The moment came when established his signature style of landscape painting after returning home. In the two masterpieces emanating the shamanic energy, One Round Sweep (1994) and a landscape of Sojeong-ri (1997), Whang puts together all his plastic experiments with various media and proposed a new type of borderless landscape. His digital landscapes which have been continuously presented since 2000 are an epistemological and ontological confluence of and an ambivalent unification of the two opposites. They are the result of ambivalent cooperation between the tradition of landscape as a representative East Asian genre and the Western invention of digital technology, naturalist landscape and mathematical methodology, and the right and left brain of the artist, who changed his major from engineering to art.
6.
The duality of digital landscape has an implication of temporality in that it embodies a modernization of tradition or creates a juxtaposition of the past and present tenses. Not only in An Old Breeze whose title is suggestive of the passage of time, but also in the “Mongyu” series, remakes of the famous painting by An Gyeon, Bang Geumgangjeon-do and Bang Inwangjesaek-do, appropriations of two paintings by Gyeomjae Jeong Seon, and Sehan Villa, a sculptural rendition of Sehan-do by Chusa Kim Jeonghee, Whang transfers There/Then to Here/Now, using contemporary medium and methodologies. And for Whang, one of the most important elements in the strategy of turning to Here/Now is to find diverse media. Through the materials such as colorful crystals, silicon and Lego blocks, rusty rivets, glittering mirror pieces and hologram, the artist could breathe the vitality of modernity into black and white landscape painting.
The duality of digital landscape has an implication of temporality in that it embodies a modernization of tradition or creates a juxtaposition of the past and present tenses. Not only in An Old Breeze whose title is suggestive of the passage of time, but also in the “Mongyu” series, remakes of the famous painting by An Gyeon, Bang Geumgangjeon-do and Bang Inwangjesaek-do, appropriations of two paintings by Gyeomjae Jeong Seon, and Sehan Villa, a sculptural rendition of Sehan-do by Chusa Kim Jeonghee, Whang transfers There/Then to Here/Now, using contemporary medium and methodologies. And for Whang, one of the most important elements in the strategy of turning to Here/Now is to find diverse media. Through the materials such as colorful crystals, silicon and Lego blocks, rusty rivets, glittering mirror pieces and hologram, the artist could breathe the vitality of modernity into black and white landscape painting.
His interest in Here/Now is revealed primarily by his real-view landscapes of the natural views surrounding him and scenic spots. He had already represented the scenery of Mt. Bukhan and Sojeong-ri before 2000 and after that, continued depicting real nature through digital landscapes. A good example would be Sunset in Upo, a landscape of Upo Wetland near the Nakdong River, which was shown together with his ‘blown-up’ series made by magnifying and reproducing parts of existing landscape paintings in his solo exhibition at Frey Norris Gallery, San Francisco, 2008. Whang also placed elements from classical landscape paintings and those of actual, present-day scenery together. In Like a Breeze, a wall painting displayed at the 2003 Venice Biennale, his representation of a Joseon Dynasty landscape using mirror pieces was overlapped by the view of the Venice Beach seen through the glass wall of the Korean Pavilion, resulting in the integration of the virtual and the real, and scenes inside and outside the exhibition space into one.
Furthermore, this new extended form of real-view painting evolves into a kind of genre painting of contemporary culture. As was proved by A Breeze over Troubled Water, a mixture of the Joseon painting of Arhats and contemporary advertising images, Whang is concerned about the present society and popular culture as much as about traditional Korean culture. His interest in the times was concretized as an investigation into temporality in Ferrari and Playboy which dealt with luxury brands and popular magazine. In order words, they visualized chronological time and its traces through the process of protein putrefaction. Such experiments with process art were prefigured in the usage of rusted rivets or oxidized steel in digital landscapes.
Hwang’s works involve the dimension of time in terms not only of creative process, but of ways of appreciating. In particular, his mural landscapes, which are horizontally long like an unfolded scroll, incorporate temporality in their planeness by proposing reading rather than seeing. His environmental mixed media installations, which are made to activate the sense of touch and synesthesia, rather than sight, promote phenomenological communication with the audience and attain the four-dimensional theatricality. And for this very reason, his digital landscape can be associated with video as a perception medium which triggers the audience’s memory through its moving images. In some sense, Paul Virilio’s argument that “seeing is foreseeing (voir, c'est prevoir)” seems to perfectly go for Whang’s digital landscape laden with temporality, too (Paul Virilio, “Image Virtuelle,” Video-Video, Paris: Revue d'Esthetique [10], 1988, pp. 33-34.). And the exhibition title, Today That Will Be Yesterday by Tomorrow, chosen by the artist himself, turns out to be the most successful summary of Whang’s art which bridges between the two poles, or traditional landscape painting and contemporary digital art.
Kim Hong-hee (Director of Seoul Museum of Art / Art Critic)
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