Structure and Meditation: the Recent Work of “Namchun” Song Soo-nam

For over twenty years now, Song Soo-nam, who is better known under his artistic name “Namchun,” has been concentrating on black-ink painting. More than just a period of time, however, for Namchun the past twenty years have been a period of passion. In the beginning of the nineteen-eighties, he was an active participant in the black-ink painting movement. By the mid-eighties, having taken the best of the movement, he struck out alone along an independent path in order to personalize his craft. He strove to deepen the unique spiritual world inside black-ink painting and to use it as an intermediary. Some artists see black-ink painting as a monotonous medium. They feel its limits, and fail to overcome them. This is especially true now, at a time when there are so many different media and materials. In spite of this, however, black-ink painting holds a strange attraction for us, not only as a transcendent medium, but perhaps also as a demonstration that art is indeed a ceremonious return to a spirit that has abandoned all matter.

More than any other genre in art, black-ink painting has a sober character that returns to itself. It is fortunate that now, certain Korean artists are rediscovering that, as a media, black-ink painting has been for a long time and still is a cultivated world of the spirit. It goes without saying that Namchun’s passion for black-ink painting is based on this world. His recent works differ in their nuances from many of his past works. They continue to exploit his knack for repeated, even brush strokes. Now, however, they are part of a deeper, more meticulous composition. His work seems to embrace monotony, because of its accumulation of repeated brush strokes in one direction, which is the essence of the composition and the whole. The accumulation of meticulous brush strokes of an even thickness are like the enlargement of a section of tightly woven fabric or a comb motif on the surface of a ceramic from period of the Three Kingdoms.

Nowhere is there artifice, only the fleeting act of painting with a nonchalance that awakens monumental space. As soon as one line is painted, another responds to it naturally. Together, they push and pull as if they rub against one another. The artist’s changes in the intensity of the ink, going from a clear to an intense black, create an inner breath that liberates the work from mechanical repetition and responds to the meticulous composition, whose echoes extend across the entire canvas. In the midst of invariability the artist provokes change, and in change he is prudently moderate. His lines become wider as they free themselves, and at the same time they respond silently and difficultly to the theory of return through self-destruction. Insouciant toward repetition, the canvas is both filled with dense brush strokes and empty of them.

It breathes intermittently, and touches the infinite by forming a long band. The brush strokes’ movement is no longer the scene of expression, yet responds to the depth of meditation and the regular breath that finds calm in itself. Namchun’s work, which gives one the impression of prudently approaching an outer expressivity without losing confidence in the inner depth of black-ink painting, is the fruit of the artist’s understanding of the character of the media. Because of this understanding, his black-ink painting continues to influence young artists and touch a large public.

By Oh Kwang-su