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A Painterly Inquiry about Light, Color, and Material

Hyeyoung Shin / Curator

Can we call it a painting a painting made without a brush and canvas? It has been long since the painting of Seungtaik Jang has abandoned the brush and canvas, If one adheres to the logic of 'Modernism' of the West that advocates the purity of painting, his painting is not a painting. Yet, if one considers the materialistic manifestation of light and color as the focal nature of painting, his paintinq is no doubt a painting. For he has made every effort to disclose the universal truth of the world by letting light and color pass through material as he has continuously experimented with diverse materials within the frame of painting while abandoning the brush. Among the materials he has used are translucent paraffin or synthetic resins mixed with oil paint or pigments and plexiglass boxes in which light penetrates through panels painted lightly with different colors while engendering a single color, and in this exhibition glass is newly employed leaving the plastic materials of the previous years behind. What have been coherent in his entire work up to now is, however, not the colors as pigments placed on painting surfaces but the colors that flexibly respond to light as they communicates with it and also his inquiry into material that concretizes the encounter with the world by holding light and color.

The first solo exhibition of Jang in 1990 already forecast the peculiar quality of his painting of today. In the exhibition for which Jean-Louis Ferrier wrote an article entitled 'L'Esprit de la matiere,' Jang showed his abstract paintings in which the energy of his own inner mind is exposed violently and boldly while coIors and forms are restrained to the minimum. The paintings of this period are the only ones that utilized canvas and the brush among his oeuvre, but they use the dripping, spreading and staining of pigments as their main methods and contain collages by use of metal objects while strongly foreseeing the later development of his work through which he has continued to inquire into the nature of objecthood.

If the light of Van Gogh is the light ar noon in midsummer,

My light is the light in the sky at dawn touching land,

The light at the rim of the sun during a solar eclipse,

And the transparent light on the short-clipped nail of the middle finger of an immature girl.

Light and color are the elementary components of painting,

But in my work, they are the absolute elements together with translucent mediums.

Revealing the mind through the concretization of light is what my work truly intends to do.

- Seungtaik Jang

For about five years after his first solo exhibition Jang's artistic exploration of material was at its peak. Having not satisfied with the objecthood of pigments on the surface of canvas, he made many experiments on the obejcthoods of diverse materials by employing such materials that a painter would be unable even to imagine using as oil, wax, Paraffin, synthetic resins, salt and soot. This reminds one of Arte Povera in Italy that established a new avant-garde mode while using such antiaesthetic materials as earth, asbestos, black lead, ice, tar and rubber at the end of the 1960s. When Arte Povera concentrated, however, mainly on installation works in order to expose the objecthood of material itself, Jang utilized certain materials through which light could penetrate to some extent within the rectangular frame of painting in order to focus on the generation of color as the materials interacted with light. At the time, he produced smooth color planes for which he poured paraffin or wax into frames of regular thicknesses, mixed it with oil paint and let it coagulate or he put pigments into synthetic resins and let them solidity, and made irregular color planes of white or black color by piling up salt in several layers between glass plates or by fuming the inside surfaces of glass plates.

The works made during this period looked like monochrome paintings in their appearances, but they were far from Monochrome Painting as registered in the history of art in their origin, and they were in ract more akin to three-dimensional objects with strong objecthook rather than painting. Also, they were fundamentally different from the works of Minimalism since they depended on the artist's active intervention and labor of boiling, melting, dripping, solidifying, burning and fuming although they used industrial materials and regular forms.

After the period of his full-pledged inquiry into objecthood in the early 1990s, he arrived at the translucent and smooth land of plexiglass. The work with synthetic resins on which he pushed himself for a while met his artistic need to some extent because synthetic resins allowed light to penetrate through and were homogeneously mixed with pigments and provided smooth and glossy surface texture. But irs production process, which was greatly different from that of painting to apply pigments onto flat surfaces, prevented the artist whose artistic parent was painting from continuing the work. From that time he started to apply oil paint onto the plexiglass surfaces instead of canvas with a rroller or his hand instead of a brush. What should be noticed above all is that he constructed a space where light could stay on by making a box of regular thickness of plexiglass. Light peneetrates though the surface painted lightly with a color, passes through certain space to meet a defferent color of the inside surface and is reflected out. And there produced 'multilayered painting' where light, color and material become one while differentiating itself from a monochrome painting that uses canvas. This painting, which is called 'PoIy-Painting,' is regarded as the pronoun for Jang's painting and has gone through gradual transformation for about a decade from the late 1990s to the present: a same color generated subtle difference in the overall tonality as the color of the inside changed; some traces of action were made by the partial pressing out of paint on the surface with the side of his hand; monochrome planes of low chromas were made by placing different color planes over a surface repeatedly; and his latest attempt produced polychromic planes where colors of similar hue were gradated on a surface or totally different colors were overlapped to engender contrast.

Another artistic axis of Jang's work, which began during the same period when his 'PoIy-Painting'was made, is 'PoIy-Drawing'. Whlle showing holes studded on a white ground Iike ripples made by tiny stones thrown onto calm water, this series is clearly different from his previous work which concentrated only on color. Severa] layers of translucent polyester film sheets with circles of slightly different sizes are laid one on top of another and a sheet of hologram paper is pressed onto the inside panel while lleaving a space between them.  And these poly-drawing are given the name of 'drawing' not of 'painting' because not colors but cut lines are the agents by which images are created. These holes, which are produced by circular lines and resemble the black holes in the universe, lucidly illustrate the depth in the picture plane and the effect of light that he has consistently seek after while contributing to the contrast between the previous, homogeneous color planes and the poIy drawings'. Yet, his poly-drawings have been shown only intermittently since their first exhibition in 1996 and they have been neither studied nor exhibited enough in comparison with his poly-paintings  Jang's Trans-Painting,' which is his new series to be shown for the first time in this exhibition, is the outcome of his in-depth study on his previous works of poly-drawings and poly-paintings where the transformations of the two different forms are combined, It is true that there have been other attempts of combining the two: he made diptychs of poly-drawings and poly-paintings of the same sizes; he experimented the poly-drawing within ploy-painting by repeating the process of attaching circles made of self-adhesive paper and applying paint onto it and removing it. But at this time he pushes the combination to the full. In this exhibition, he developed his poly-painting whose production he had stopped for a while by expanding the range of materials for it and ventured various attempts while employing glass as his main material and abandoning plexiglass of his poly-painting to which he held past almost for a decade. What is more important is that he composed dazzling variations by integrating the two forms. Jang made a free combination of the white plane of his poly-drawing and the color plane of his poly-painting in his trans-painting series as Mondrian did for his 'Composition' Series. Jang produced triptychs and quadriptychs in diverse forms consisted of planes different in proportion and size while going beyond the form of a diptych. The name of 'trans-painting' suggestively reveals that his material is 'transparent' and his method is to 'translate' the oriqinal structure of painting by putting together his unit works.

In fact, Jang's trans-paining condenses all the artistic attempts that he has made for more than 15 years while abandoning a brush and canvas and represents a turning point in his artistic development. For he intends to show in a most effective way the kind of painting that he pursues on the basis of all the skills and all the trials and errors cumulated until now and simultaneously for his inquiry into new materials is greatly affecting the nature of his work. In overall, it seems that his work has become streamlined and light as its color scheme is brighter whiIe primary cotors are chiefly used, a wider range of materials are employed and its production process is more elaborated. The use of gIass that let light fully penetrate through unlike translucent plexiglass imbues the painted color with more vividness. The sense of ready-madeness, which can be felt in colored glass panels, rather than that of painting is stronger as color is applied only on the inside plane of the glass and its outside maintains intactly the smooth and glossy texture of glass. Various effect and subtle differences are attempted by using different kinds of glass m terms of color and transparency and by p!acing self-adhesive co!or paper or a mirror over the inside the plane of the glass panel. In the case of drawings, the color of the hole and the overall color scheme are varied in accordance with the kinds of the glass used, the textures of polyester film sheets and the colors applied to the inside plane of the panel. Also, the ji-ixtaposition of the lines made by cuttlng and those of the traces of a knife generates change in its images. The overall production process is developed from that of the previous work, but it is more complicated and elaborated: The aluminum frame of 6 centimeters wide is made first, then a panel of glass applied with color paint is placed over the frame (in painting) or several layers of polyester fi!m sheets are placed over the glass (in drawing), next, some space is put between them and finally foamax applied with a different color is used to close up the back side.

At a glance, Jang's trans-painting seemingly has an appearance more minimalistic than ever. But he always performs the entire process by himself, and thus the diversification of material and the elaboration of the process aggrandize the bodily action and labor intensity of the artist. Accordingly, his painting, in fact, distances itself from Minimal Art more than ever despite its appearance. The most appealing aspect of the work of Jang is that the production process of his work and the appearance of it contract each other. As the synthetic resin or paraffin panels that appear to be industrial raw materials used in the previous works were made by him by boiling, Pouring and let solidifying around the clock, these smooth color-field paintings, which look like small ready-made articles for house decoration manufactured, in a factory, are made by his own hands without any help from others from constructing a frame by' cutting aluminum, to applying co!or and to making a support for the back with wooden sticks. Who could guess that this 'minimal' appearance is hiding that 'maximal' process behind it?

The general interpretation of Jang's work as Monochrome Painting or Minimal Art is, therefore, definitely a fallacy. His painting utterly defies the art-historical definition of Monochrome Painting that assumes a brush and canvas as the essential elements of painting, and further although its appearance corresponds to two-dimensional, monochromatic painting, it is neither monochromatic nor two-dimensional in the strictest sense, In addition, the refined appearance caused by the use of industrial materials.is premised on dreadfully intricate handwork. Since he is consistently seeking after the inherent nature of painting while crossing and going beyond the different artistic tendencies and concepts that contradict and conflict with one another within the structure of art history, the terms used to refer to his painting such as 'poly,' which means 'many' or 'complex,' and 'trans,' which mean 'across' or 'beyond' seem to be precisely befitting terms to modify his work. His long 'journey of painting' that has continued over a decade and a half without using canvas or a brush has been a silent walk towards the invisible end of the vast land of painting and he will keep walking on that Iand.

Preface of gallery Gaain exhibition in 2008.