In British folklore there is a mythical character known as the Green Man. Who and what is the Green Man is impossible to precisely tell; but at the least he must stand for nature; the force of nature, a spirit and wildness that will not be tamed. The Green Man slips and twists his way through history, (although he is not exclusively British, many countries have their version of him), he appears in the Legends of King Arthur, he finds popular heroic fame as Robin Hood and he gives his name to many Pubs up and down the land. Lately the Green Man is a symbol adopted by eco warriors, an emblem and talisman in their fight to save the planet. Nonetheless it still came as a surprise to meet him in Sung Yong Kim’s Busan studio.
I met Sung Yong early in July of this year, introduced by a mutual contact who thought it good we should meet considering we were both to be working in the same building. We sat thoughtfully in his studio for a cup of ginseng tea; on the wall watching over us was one of his large figure drawings from the series ‘Autumn’. The picture dominating the busy work-space depicted a muscular figure looming out at us; its head obscured by a wreath of autumnal leaves, one fist clenched and the other hand’s massive index figure pointing to the ground. It was a slightly daunting first meeting with this bullish figure at our side, I thought then how weird to be seeing something hauntingly familiar five thousand miles from home.
I begin by talking about the Green Man not only as it comes to mind as a first impression on seeing Kim’s work but also because of the idea of circularity it represents and because it is a containing metaphor big enough to hold the range of Kim’s production. The Green Man cannot die despite the human shape he inhabits; he constantly re-emerges, literally from out of the ground. For instance, the Green Man in the Arthurian Legends has his head axed off, at which points his body picks the head up by the hair and rides off with it. An image I am sure that would appeal to Sung Yong Kim, appealing to him also because Green Man stories have tragedy in their grain; they must have because they are all stories of birth and death, the renewal of the life cycle. Dylan Thomas puts it like this in the first verse of his poem ‘The Force That through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower’, from 1934.
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees Is my destroyer. And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.
The characteristic constant that drives Kim’s practice is this same life force, impish and destroyer by turn, his images; people, animals and landscapes emerge from the pictorial ground. By this I mean they have the sense about them of being summoned up, they are not straight portraiture or illustration, the kind that mirror a ‘see-able’ world, he looks for what is unseen. The emotion, expression and comprehensible energy each work exhibits is illustrative but metaphysically so, these figures and animals are shape changers, things of spirit that like the owl fly between night and day. This is especially present when the works emerge from a dark ground as though having arrived from another world. In this respect Kim’s vision is one that takes a while to get used to, it isn’t showing us the high-street, quite the reverse but is as demanding of our attention from first sight.
Over a period of some months I met Sung Yong Kim many more times and grew used to seeing different versions of ‘Autumn’ arrive in his studio. Often I found myself thinking about George Frederic Watts painting of ‘The Minotaur’, but was not certain why. With the two images at last in front of me I think I now know. It’s the similar colours, the naked torso but most of all it is the head. Bull’s heads do not sprout from men’s bodies; the fusion requires a substantial suspension of disbelief for the painting to work. Wattshas the Minotaur turned away from the viewer, placing us as stealthy onlooker, arousing our curiosity about the half seen monster and conscious of our own position as unseen viewer. The face of leaves in ‘Autumn’pulls the same trigger of curiosity in us and similarly pushes us questioningly back onto ourselves. In the encounter with this figure we find ourselves looking at an abstraction, Kim arouses our desire to see a face where a face should be. Instead we see the bunch of leaves and although we may wish to presume they cover a face that idea must be dismissed, there’s nothing to support it. The leaves cover nothing, instead it becomes apparent that the leaves are the face and theyare not only leaves but also a swirling mass of energy, hairy and fiery; they are both literally what they appear to be and metaphorically more. How to meet such an image, how to communicate with it? And yet I find that one instinctively moves towards this picture because there is a sadness and contemplative air here, just as there is with Watt’s ‘Minotaur’, which at heart is loneliness; that most human part of the human condition.
It is not only that Kim’s figures come out of the darkness his colours do to, the gradations of colour bring with them an emotional charge; cold, heat, warmth, joyfulness, softness and so forth, instinctive and. primal. More mysterious though is the light that reveals them, where does it come from? Occasionally a reference to directional sunlight is made but on the whole the subjects appear to be illuminated by an internal light source. The images of Van Gogh out walking are good examples of this. In these pictures the light appears to be coming out of his hat or his eye to provide the flickering illumination to the twilight world through which he travels. The natural world around Kim’s ‘Vincent’is threatening, hostile; the figure like a miner deep below the surface walks through a tunnel perfectly alone. It is not an Arcadian nature that Kim hands to us, very often his nature is malevolent and threatening, the place of night terrors; even Hitler is found there, run through by the spears of a spiky house plant gone native. The dark is the dark forest of fear, the Green Man’s original habitat.
Looking at Sung Yong Kim’ prolific output of pictures it is easy to get sucked into their shadowy depths but a second look at any work will reveal that there is a particular top surface to be understood as well. Sung Yong Kim’s signature technique is a layer drawn onto the work in ball-point pen. This layer is made up of thousands upon thousands of pen strokes applied rapidly during trance like working sessions and it achieves a number of distinct aims. The first is that it creates a mesh rather like a fine net. It is reminiscent of steel point engraving where depth and form are created by concentrations of parallel lines which intensify or dissipate to give the illusion of solid shapes, depth, light or shade. The Gustave Dore engraving below is a good example.
This linear technique binds the image surface together and stitches the fore-ground through the colour and rough modelling of the painted image from frontto back. It means that no matter how roughly executed the composition, drawing and paintwork is there is always finesse about the finished work. The surface of Kim’s art up close offers a secondary reading to the initial impacting image we first encounter. Withinevery work the surface reveals a world orchestrated by marks which ebb and flow from edge to edge, pitching and rolling the eye as it travels over each picture’s topography. It is a strangely successful technique, one that is able to offer graphic precision alongside wild exuberance. It allows Kim to dominate the picture surface and provide a protective layer to what are often highly vulnerable images. I fear that without this safety net, the works would open up to the viewer to quickly like a rushed confession. It is the time consuming pen-work on the surface which ironically gives his pictures their final depth.
This ball-point patina that is his trademark creates a counter balance of rhythms and melody to the stark beat of his imagery. The mesh of lines give form to the gestural marks and colours, it is a kind of container or again net is the word that comes to mind that is able hold the range of image and emotion he works with. Perhaps his greatest achievement is his ability to combine forces within one work, so that a picture by him can emanate a tangible sense of stillness whilst simultaneously writhingwith pictorial life.
In amongst the range of things that Kim paints are many calm images and many extreme images too. For some the extremes will be seen as hysterical, over obvious, for others the same images will be thrilling and real. In all of this I see Kim standing aloof, alone and watching, allowing what he sees to pass through him on directly into his work. In a sense his images are very pure; he doesn’t get in their way. There is no theory over-coat one has to wear to understand them, no elaborate illusions or conceptual lens to peer through, the work is startlingly present, which is un-nerving at times or may appear naive. The work may be awkward but it isn’t naive, they are not easy pictures because the world that Sung Yong sees is in his own words ‘never easy’. Simply put that world and the subject in the broadest sense is Koreanow. Kim is a true artist who reports truthfully or at least as truthfully as any thinking artist should.
If rape, poison, daggers, arson Have not yet embroidered with their pleasing designs The banal canvas of our pitiable lives, It is because our souls have not enough boldness.
From ‘To the reader’ by Charles Baudelaire
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