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The Superimposition of Light and Layers of Thought: The Depth of Seungtaik Jang's Painting |
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Lee Jinmyung(Art Critic & Doctor of Philosophy) |
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When seeking to understand the world of artist Seungtaik Jang (張勝澤, b. 1959), the central concept—indeed the most defining keyword and epithet—is his original term “layered painting.” A proper interpretation of this term is essential for a full and accurate comprehension of the artist’s work. Seungtaik Jang did not begin his career with “layered painting.” Prior to the emergence of this series—which garnered public attention around 2020—the artist had been exploring a new trajectory in contemporary painting under the concept of “Trans-Painting.” His Untitled–Transpainting series, developed before the 2010s, consisted of works in which layers of tempered glass were placed over aluminum panels, with polyester film or pigments inserted between them to create a sense of depth. By combining “trans-,” meaning “to change” or “to go beyond,” with “painting,” the artist sought to transcend the conventional notion of painting itself. Traditionally, the essence of painting had been associated with expression, form, or flatness. However, the most authoritative interpretation—articulated by Arthur Danto—positions the brushstroke as central. According to Danto, the moment a brushstroke ceases to be a mere trace of color and becomes an expressive act of designation, it enters the realm of art. The brushstroke thus functions as an interpretive device that constitutes painting as art.1 1: Arthur C. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), pp. 107-111. Seungtaik Jang, however, unsettles the very premise of this definition by transcending the brushstroke itself. His “layered painting” series can be seen as both an extension and culmination of Trans-Painting. That is, his work no longer merely questions the visible—it moves beyond it entirely. Then how is a layered painting created? With a massive, horizontally guided brush, the surface is painted with great care and effort. After that, it must be left to dry over time, then washed with water (cleansed), and patiently waited upon. Again, it is painted with a subtly different hue, left to dry, and washed once more—this process must be repeated countless times. It takes several months to complete a single work. Within this sedimentation of time, both the artist who makes the work and we who behold it are confronted with aesthetic qualities, philosophical contemplation, and ethical demands. What does it mean that applying color (brushing) and removing color (cleansing) exist in a relationship of equivalence? This is where the core of this writing lies. The artist’s painting interrogates the structure of “being” through strata of color, exploring the essence of collaboration between time and sensation as it is conceived through repeated layers of brushwork and pigment. Seungtaik Jang’s layered painting is not merely a formal investigation—it must be understood as a philosophical practice that traverses the tension between Western modernist conventions and East Asian sensibilities. Since first encountering Jang’s work in 2009, I have immersed myself in the world of his art. His paintings led me to rediscover the profound insights in Amy Sillman’s essay On Color. As a painter, poet, and formidable art theorist, Sillman (b. 1955) sheds light on the affective and often marginalized role of color in contemporary painting. Secondly, the work of Martin J. Powers, an American scholar of East Asian art history, has enabled me to reflect on how the politics of the brushstroke in East Asian traditions can serve as both a resistance to and an alternative for Western painterly conventions. Thirdly, to fully grasp the philosophical underpinnings of Jang’s practice, one must engage with the thought of Joseph Brodsky (1940–1996), the Russian poet whose writings have deeply influenced the artist. Ever since Brodsky was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1987, Jang has repeatedly recited and contemplated his poetry as a method for probing contemporary art. Jang’s years of study in Paris also shaped his experience as a peripheral and foreign subject, compelling him to reflect on the strata of history, signals between people, and the broader social context. Here, the thought of Édouard Glissant (1928–2011)—particularly his concept of the “right to opacity” for peripheral existences—offers a compelling framework through which to understand Jang’s visual and existential inquiries. At times, I also read Jang’s artistic project as a challenge to the patriarchal logic found in Ad Reinhardt’s (1913–1967) monochromatic absolutism. Through dialogue with several figures in contemporary art and philosophy, I seek to explore the ethical dimensions of color and brushwork, transparency and repetition, marginality and reflection. This essay is merely a preliminary draft. Should the opportunity arise, I hope to develop a more comprehensive scholarly study devoted to the work of Seungtaik Jang. The distinguished American painter and art theorist Amy Sillman offers a compelling and resonant argument in her essay “On Color.” According to Sillman, color has long been a repressed sense—dismissed as feminine and decorative—and this suppression continues to persist within the contemporary art world. She argues that color is irrational and non-logical, and that the act of loving color in painting still reads as a form of defiance or resistance.2 2: Amy Sillman, in Isabelle Graw and Ewa Lajer-Burcharth (eds.), “On Color,” Painting beyond Itself (Frankfurt am Main: Sternberg Press, 2016), p. 111. Seungtaik Jang, too, can be seen as a painterly embodiment of this rebellion. Seungtaik Jang repeatedly layers transparent colors in his paintings—blurring but never erasing the presence of pigment—to construct strata of sensation. His layered painting questions the ethics of painting through a liberation of color. In doing so, color breaks away from the rational object, and sensation precedes ideology. This is because Western patriarchal modernism has positioned reason at the apex of its hierarchical structure of power. As a result, the preference for color has been confined to the lower domains of sensation or decoration. This logic underlies the minimalist or monochromatic movements—often considered the final culmination of modernist painting—which either reduce color to a single tone or treat its abundance as taboo. Consequently, within the modernist canon, polychrome painting has often been dismissed as feminine or decorative. Yet, through his methodology of layered painting, Seungtaik Jang rediscovers and reclaims the suppressed hierarchy of the feminine, the decorative, and the sensory—those elements marginalized by Western patriarchal modernism. By layering, he not only interrogates the conditions of painting (especially the condition of flatness) but also overturns and reconfigures the uneven burden borne by femininity, decoration, and sensation as opposed to reason, restraint, and thought. In Japanese, this imbalance is called futsuriai fuka (不釣り合い負荷). Thus, Jang’s painting is both polychromatic and monochromatic, decorative yet rational. Ultimately, these binaries collapse into ambiguity, suspending judgment itself. In doing so, the conservative locks that have long secured rigid hierarchies are released within his work. Seungtaik Jang’s paintings offer far more than visual beauty: they become layers of sensation and sedimented time—a potent gesture toward the historical reconciliation of modernist art. Over the past three years, I have closely studied the writings of American East Asian art historian Martin J. Powers, whose insights have significantly deepened my understanding of the political significance of the brushstroke in relation to Seungtaik Jang’s painting. In his seminal essay, The Cultural Politics of the Brushstroke, Powers argues that the brushstroke in East Asian painting traditions has functioned not merely as a formal expressive device but as an embodiment of morality, being, and personhood.3 3: Martin J. Powers, “The Cultural Politics of the Brushstroke,” The Art Bulletin, Vol. 95 (2013), pp. 312–325. Unlike the Western tradition, where an artist’s gesture is often viewed as the proprietary expression of the artist’s ego or physicality, the East Asian bihua (筆劃)—or brush-mark—has been understood as a relational and ethical act. In Seungtaik Jang’s painting, the brushstroke is neither explosive nor declarative. Instead, through dozens or even hundreds of layering gestures, he constructs a subtle grain of sensation. His brushwork becomes what might be called “the brushstroke as relation” or “the stroke as structured thought.” In fact, Jang’s cryptic working process demands a difficult and intricate explanation. Simply put, his practice equally values the actions of drawing, brushing, and marking as well as those of washing, drying, and waiting. This is evocative of the well-known ancient Chinese tale of Emperor Yao and the recluse Xu You (許由). When Emperor Yao, facing his death, offered to abdicate the throne to Xu You, Xu refused—claiming that the offer itself was a form of contamination—and went to a river to wash his ears. Upon hearing this, the herdsman Chaofu (巢父) refused to let his oxen drink from that same river, saying the water had been sullied by the emperor’s words. The mystical tale of Shangshan Ruoshui (上善若水, “The highest good is like water”), the noble tradition of Gaoshi Guanshui (高士觀水, “the gentleman who gazes at water”), and the recurring East Asian artistic motif of Linliuxiang (臨流像)—that is, the image of the sage who contemplates the flow of water to grasp the principles of existence—all resonate deeply with Seungtaik Jang’s practice. These are not mere gestures of aesthetic contemplation, but embodied acts of thought: sensory rituals through which the flux of nature and being becomes a source of philosophical insight. Jang’s painting, by refusing to foreground the trace of the brush, inverts the politics of the brushstroke and instead calls us to a new ethics of color. His color does not demand to be seen—it demands to be waited for. It is not a material object, but a temporal insight: the awareness of time as ethical unfolding. Through the act of washing—both metaphorically and methodologically—Jang envisions a color ethics that precedes and challenges Western rationalism. In this context, it is worth briefly introducing two poems by the great Russian-born poet Joseph Brodsky: “Nature Morte” and “Verses on the Death of T. S. Eliot.” Seungtaik Jang has confessed that since 1987, he has repeatedly recited Brodsky’s works and drawn deep inspiration from them for his own artistic practice. The thing. And its brown color. Its outlines blurred. Twilight. Nothing around. Nothing else. Nature mortes. Death will come, discover The body, whose calm will reflect death’s visit like a lover’s, with the same effect. Skull, skeleton, sickle in hand – this absurdity, all lies: “Death will come and she will have your eyes” These are introspective poetic monologues that meditate on the boundaries between being and time, between objects and sensation. One of Brodsky’s poems opens with the lines: “Things and people arise / amongst us. And both are stark, / and both are hard on the eyes. / It’s best to live in the dark.” In these verses, the poet evokes a suspended stillness in which the movement of the external world appears arrested, and sensation and language settle into overlapping layers. Seungtaik Jang’s painting resonates deeply with this poetic stillness. The accumulated layers of color in his work do not merely produce visual depth; they embody the sedimentation of time, the condensation of emotion, and the outline of existence itself. His paintings think through color and speak through silence. Whenever I encounter Jang’s work and its politics of sensation, I am reminded of Édouard Glissant’s concept of the “right to opacity.” Glissant argued that when we seek to understand otherness, it is not through clarity and transparency that we practice ethics, but through the acknowledgment of opacity.4 4: Benjamin P. Davis, Choose Your Bearing: Édouard Glissant, Human Rights and Decolonial Ethics (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023), pp. 3–8. Seungtaik Jang’s paintings, through their enigmatic calibration and modulation of layered color, leave us with a “residue of sensation” that resists full comprehension. In his work, color overlaps, seeps, blurs—only to at times sharpen, deepen, and soften again. Ultimately, color refuses to be grasped; material shifts into the realm of thought. These accumulations of painted and washed layers act as sedimentations of time, which suspend our worldly urge to explain and instead invite us to enter as pure sensation. It is precisely at this juncture that Jang’s painting acquires a paradoxical ethics of transparency. The color may be transparent, yet we can never fully reach its meaning. The moment we believe we have accessed the intention behind the color, the color withdraws its agency. In other words, Jang’s painting is nothing less than the result of a perpetually unfolding dynamic equilibrium. Every time I encounter the paintings of Seungtaik Jang, a sudden, almost intuitive flash crosses my mind. As is well known, his painting practice seems to present a response—both critical and regenerative—to the absolute minimalism or absolute flatness proclaimed by Ad Reinhardt. Reinhardt’s so-called “last paintings,” those austere black or ultimate monochromes, signified a terminal proposition: that painting had reached its end, that no further evolution within the medium was possible. It was a closure within history—a final sentence on what painting could be. But Seungtaik Jang, instead of accepting this limit, inserts his gesture of “layering” (gyeopchim) onto that very plane. He does not reject the flatness, but rather turns it inward by pressing color into its depths. He constructs depth not through illusion, but through sensation. For Jang, the flatness Reinhardt pursued is not a terminus but a foundational tension—something to acknowledge and then transcend. In this sense, Jang’s work passes through Reinhardt’s late painting, only to move beyond it. What emerges is a set of vital equilibria: the balance of reason and sensation, transcendence and everydayness, masculinity and femininity, thought and emotion, life and death, the noble and the profane. Painting for Jang is no longer an autonomous object but a stratigraphy of relations, a current that transcends both intellect and sensation—a living category of its own. Therefore, Seungtaik Jang’s layered painting offers a critical threshold through which one might contemplate an ethics of sensation—an invitation to think not only through what is seen, but through what resists seeing. His work is not about the aesthetics of the visible, but the metaphysics of the invisible: a dense structure of relations in which memory and time, otherness and existence mutually sustain and burden each other (buchi 扶持) through persistent interaction. This exhibition thus regards Jang’s practice as a reconstruction of modern pictorial language—indeed, a profound philosophical proposition wherein the aesthetics of the East Asian peripheral subject seeks to uphold what is missing at the very core of Western modernism. In Jang’s work, a “layer” is never merely a layer of pigment. It is a sedimented depth of historical thought, a well of sensation into which the light of time has slowly accumulated. And it is Joseph Brodsky, once again, who speaks for us—this time in his poem Verses on the Death of T. S. Eliot—where the poet reminds us that: It was not God, but only time, mere time that called him. The young tribe of giant waves will bear the burden of his flight until it strikes the far edge of its flowering fringe, to bid a slow farewell, breaking against the limit of the earth. On this plane—where disappearance and emergence occur simultaneously—Seungtaik Jang’s painting speaks not of form, but of the ontology of time: of the sedimentation of light that unfolds beyond the limits of our perception. Here, painting is no longer an act of seeing. It becomes, instead, a tactile encounter with the deep deposits of time that lie dormant within us—a gesture of touching the residues of being itself.
1: Arthur C. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), pp. 107-111.
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