Kim, Hong Tae

Looking for a Primordial World
– Innocence and the Primordial in Kim Hong-tae’s Work

1.
It has already been around 20 years since Kim Hong-tae’s Innocence and the Primordial first emerged. Infatuated with landscapes with the contemplative mood of the 1970s and 80s, Kim explored child-like worlds and the innocent minds of children starting from the 1980s and 90s until the present. The spiritual basis on this path was the Trinity. Kim considered children to be the subject of Heaven and the manifestation of angels and understood childlike qualities as the archetype of the primordial spirits an artist has to bear.

His work has chiefly shown silhouettes of children’s bodies as well pet animals, elephants, chickens, ducks, goats, lambs, playthings, rainbows, ladders, and bicycles in the surroundings of the children. Kim often depicted them in a line, accentuating a twilight-like atmosphere. Kim’s early pieces attempt to present the meaning of his juvenile world by partitioning the canvas with several grids and arranging those items according to this system.

Kim believes children’s painting to be the epitome of the primitiveness that he has pursued and thus, appropriates the process through which kids render their own pictures. The painting style Kim created and established in the 1990s is analogous to graffiti, which refers to images or lettering scratched, scrawled, or marked on a temple wall or pillar. This type of painting was usually completed by partitioning the canvas and then applying the paint to each divided area, but sometimes was made through a different process of drawing, painting, and deleting, with special emphasis on the scratch marks. These pieces foreshadow his principle technique of deconstructing images in an Abstract Expressionist manner.

Kim’s painting addresses certain specific issues such as Christian contemplation and the innocence of childhood, in which he tries to embody his own view of a primordial world. It is not a mere accident that cultural-biological and evolutionary thought as well as most other phenomena all contain a sense of the primitive, which can be said to be the original source of the ‘Ten Thousand Things’ found in his work. Such a conception implies that as humans come closer to the last stage of evolution, we start to possess a stronger longing for a more primordial, essential world.

It is in this context that Kim Hong-tae has been focusing on his fundamental, primitive world. As contemporary art is often based on entangled, complex theories and can be broken into a myriad of styles and genres, it should be understood that there is often a reactionary tendency that develops. For instance, much of contemporary Western painting seeks a primordial state or something of the primitive before the advent of modern, advanced civilization. Such examples are found in paintings by Arshile Gorky (1904-1948), an inborn existential artist, in art world of Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), who explored un-European civilizations, work by Die Brucke (The Bridge) and Die Blaue Reiter (The Blue rider) in the early 20th century, Surrealism in the mid-20th century, Abstract Expressionism in the mid-and-late 20th century, and finally Postmodernism in this century.

Apart of such Western cases, contemporary Asian art has constantly showed a longing for a return to innate or fundamental nature. The exploration of the primitive in the West is derived from a resistance to egotism, which governed much of modern and contemporary Western thought. In contrast, a similar exploration in the East seeks what can be called the ‘Theory of All-oneness’ in a comprehensive sense, based on naturalism.

Artist Kim Hong-tae, based on his creed of the Trinity, presents his own ideas and depicts objects from the perspective of the ‘Theory of All-oneness.’ His art is in no way an effort to merely depict children’s growth in a fragmented atmosphere, but is an attempt to represent a fundamental, primordial world by appropriating the innocent heart of a child. In other words, he depicts the world through the eyes of children. Specifically, the artist wants to raise the level of a child’s eye to that of the primordial world that he has longed for.

Kim’s painting begins from appropriating children’s scribbles as his system of symbols. A good example of this is the self-iconic formations he has recently tried to attain. His icons and symbols reflect his own childhood memories on the canvas, but in this, he attempts non-doing or non-action rather using artificial decoration. This attempt to do nothing against nature is a technique particular to Korea, which is different when compared to the automatism of the Surrealists. While automatism is based on the ‘Unconscious Theory of the Ego,’ as reflected in the intrinsic shapes of our unconsciousness, excluding any reason or rational artificiality, non-doing refuses consciousness, unconsciousness, and Egotism altogether, concentrating on an ‘All-in-One-Horizon’ that generates harmony between the world and man.

Children usually sees the ‘Ten Thousand Things’ from ‘All-in-One-Horizon’ without distinguishing between high and low levels, value and non-value, concept and non-concept. The child’s subjectivity doe not involve any geometrical conception like two or three dimension, and furthermore, does not understand space as something high or low. Children see the world, departing from any dimension, namely from a de-dimensional perspective. They comprehend all as a whole whose surface and rear interact with each other. What they see is obviously beyond any dimension and before or after this. To say analogously, their ways of depicting the world is Kim’s method of painting.

In his recent work, Kim Hong-tae is interested in lines as a post-dimensional spatial element. He has done this for several decades, but now he approaches lines more methodologically and his lines are no longer a mere element of form. Like a string, lines are minimal factor left by the traces of drawing, deleting, and drawing again, as well as by repetitive scratching and coloring.

Kim uses the body to draw lines as his medium, but also manages to go beyond this. His lines become quite different from the corporal lines of the action painters. They are cosmic fragments transcending the subjectivity of humans. The lines that are formed by repetitive scratches and strokes and spread all over the canvas look like galactic dust or cosmic fragments.

After applying low tints of colors like amber all over the canvas and adding bluish-gray and grayish-yellow hues as well, Kim scratches the surface with a knife to render a multitude of rampant strings. Tension arises by maintaining gaps between these strings and adjusting their position.

Each string he renders has its own symbol. Kim signifies implicative, imaginative objects by embracing Arabian numbers like 3217, symbolic of the Trinity, α and Ω, emblematic of beginning and end, animal shapes from ancient murals, as well as other ornate patterns of the East.

Kim combines canvases to maximize such symbolic effects: the left canvas (yin) signifies the generation of ten thousand things and dynamism, while the right canvas (yang) suggests distinction and stillness in movement. The canvas featuring strings, with small and large rods on bluish-gray and grayish-yellow hues, is set on the left while the canvas that appears gloomy and is empty without strings and uses a number of minimal rods in a heavy, darkish atmosphere is placed on the right. What the artist intends with this placement is to let viewers appreciate two contrasting atmospheres, stillness and movement captured on the left and right.

Kim’s mode combining two contrasting elements represents the consciousness of Asian thinkers who try to comprehend the world using the theory of the relative universe of the yin-and-yang. In most of his recent work, Kim presents paintings featuring strings and rods on independent canvases.

His painting can be said to crystallize Korea’s non-doing concept or action through inaction based on the ‘Theory of All-oneness’, rather than relying on automatism or the unconsciousness. This is a key word to be remembered when discussing his work, as his recent work should be understood in this context. His art garnered international attention at the Zurich Art Fair and received an award for excellence and a grand prize at the Salon Blanc in Tokyo in 2007. His solo exhibition at Gallery Rho is expected to draw much attention from domestic art lovers.

By Kim Bok-young, Art Critic and Former Professor of Hongik University