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Seungtaik Jang: The essence is in the vestige

JinSang Yoo(Art Critic)

Painting of Seungtaik Jang which spans more than 30 years converges on one theme, which is to realize an exceptional and distinctive materiality the rectangular plane allows. His use of plexiglas and industrial paint instead of oil paint and canvas well illustrates the radical and definite direction and attitude he chose. These new materials place his two-dimensional work in a realm that cannot be easily classified nor explained, and deepen the presence of pictorial objects by making the materiality of his work converge toward a more minimalistic and immediate plane. His work not only shows the perfection of the plane, but also fulfills conceptual completion as well as technical integrity. A work of art is a cross section of a thoroughly individual world and a segmented interpretation. When we look at a work of art, we instantly realize the fact that it coincides with a form of thoroughly specific thinking. Nevertheless, the specificity of painting makes up the essential structure of the work, which only reveals itself minutely or with proportional scarcity. It is the vestige of paints minutely overlapped at the edges that reveals the pictorial quality in [Layered Painting], the latest series of Jang. Even though we are not sure whether it is intentional, only those who gaze at it are able to notice that the pictorial materiality is connected to an explosive emotion in such a minimized realm.

In his historical 1965 essay, “Specific Objects,” Donald Judd defined painting as a three-dimensional object placed as a rectangle and a flat plane within a three-dimensional space. Instead of depending on the similarity to the world represented in it, painting is rather a distinctive object cut off as a part of the larger, unspecific world, and he emphasizes “the thing as a whole, its quality as a whole is what is interesting.” The reason the world of each pictorial work is interesting is because of the shape and extraordinariness of the large and unspecific ‘world’ it belongs to. In this regard, Judd thinks the world of sculptors like his is in line with those of Rothko, Newman, Noland, and Stella. This idea places painting on a totally new horizon, by providing a clear perspective on the turn of paradigm that replaces oil painting and canvas with industrial paints and panels. As we know, what happened next was that the materiality of the plane takes the central place in our gaze.

There is another theme in the discussion of Judd to which we need to pay attention. That concerns an individual language that reveals the ‘world.’ When we talk about the painting as a flat object, we should discuss what cross section of the world it is, and how it is segmented from the world. To take an example, the painting of Rothko is not only a mass of cloud-like colors right at the center of a space surrounded by a rectangle, but also a cross section or segmented part of a universe, which can be infinitely extended through ‘its’ quality. Life and death, the subject and the object converge into the same quality in the world, and that convergence is called ‘abstraction.’ Its function is to condense the world in a concise and instant words, or to invent a kind of metonymic language.

We find several qualities that imply such condensation in Jang’s work. The first one is ‘overlapping.’ His works consist of clear and translucent planes that are overlapped or accumulated. In [Layered Painting], the overlapping of brush strokes in different colors inevitably leads to a black plane. The traces of brush strokes, which had been made repeatedly and innumerably to create this deep, dark plane still remain at the edge. That is, we can find the surplus of painting that minutely reveals its physical structure at the edge of the non-material plane that takes up the greater part of the canvas.

The second quality of the condensation is his pictorial rhetoric, which can be summed up as such that “the essence of a painting exists in its vestige.” In other words, the essence of the darkness that covers the entire canvas is the vestige of the layers that accidentally present themselves at the edge of the painting. The essence of an object is the remnant left behind by the object, unknowingly and unconsciously pushed out of the range of gaze, and pushed aside to the edge. The visual rhetoric translated into words becomes the most powerful momentum driving his work.

The third is the concluded materiality of the canvas as ‘a specific object.’ The canvas as a special object is a crucial topic in painting and its way of existence is as universal as the gravity of the earth. Therefore, the point of our discussion is not why the canvas becomes the basic structure of painting. Instead, we need to recognize that this rectangular plane is directly connected to our existence. The question about the canvas is to question about our existence. Dealing with this question, Seungtaik Jang posits the object of painting as a thoroughly individual and completed object. To gaze at the object means to look at an existence that radiates a specific existential quality as well as its surface.

[Layered Painting] series lies at the culminating point in the artist’s long painting career. The topic of the work, the black, which has become as dark as an abyss through overlapping of countless brush strokes and acrylic paints with 20~30% opacity, looks like an equivalent of the universe that is itself full of life. The universe consists of overlapping of present moment that is constantly changing. If we compare the entire universe rolling from the infinite past to the present, each present moment corresponds to each individual scene from an infinitely long roll of film. The Universe is composed of infinitely overlapped present universes that are infinitely being segmented. The second law of thermodynamics says time does not exist in the physical reality. Time is a phenomenon that is recognized by the existence ruled by the irreversible principle of thermodynamics like humans. Perception, memory, and intuition of time take the form of overlapping. That is the most basic condition to constitute the ontological and epistemological characteristic of human being. Perception of time constructs the form of nowness that makes up a vast boundary between what has passed, what is to come, and what is in between. The act of perception is vast and vain. Connecting and aligning several flat brushes, Jang draws them in acrylic paint mixed with medium and makes a translucent membrane. Then he repeats the same act with a different color. Each brush stroke amounts to each individual present. The pictorial act of the artist in [Layered Painting] constitutes a form of reaction to the way the world and time exist as humans perceive.

Jang’s work has not been fully appreciated in spite of its inherent completeness, stylistic originality and significance within the context of contemporary painting. His artistic world reminds us of the continuity of the Informel or abstract expressionist painting and at the same time implies a methodology of minimalism and conceptualism in terms of a new interpretation of painting through industrial media.

The overlapping of layers or construction of immeasurably transparent or reflexive canvas in fact entails controversial issues regarding the structural qualities of painting. What we see is a self-perfecting and relational work calling for internal elements that penetrate the whole theory of painting at the same time. Through disproportional rhetoric, it creates a new type of visual narrative that operates like an index to the world, or symbol or sign. It is certain that Jang’s work constitutes a totally important momentum in contemporary painting of Korea. We’ll eventually understand that.