The korean look in the local context
——Talking about the rural complex of Jin Kuigang's oil painting
Bao Guitao (Scholar\Curator)
The landscape oil painting space created by Jin Kuigang is not only an eternal local situation, but also a realistic field of aesthetic ideals, which is an eternal existence in the artist's heart. Not altered or alienated by any reality, but of course included transformation in the sense of the new socialist countryside. Therefore, in his paintings, the objects or symbols of the vernacular world are very brief and can be summarized in a dozen keywords. However, the painter is interested in the reality of time and space that can be summarized by these keywords, and presents the details one by one with more works, so as to realize the construction of that vernacular context. At the same time, the part that is not depicted on the canvas, the "hidden daily life", is to be implied in this scene. The latter is a more difficult choice, that is to say, he needs a complete series of works to be able to find, feel and enter the hidden parts from different angles, which is the source of motivation for his creation. It is also his journey from the initial nostalgic artist to the exploration of the beauty and fragility of a special time and space and a specific time and space of the original heart of mankind and the spiritual homeland. As a university teacher, Jin Kui has the time and energy to insist that Qingshan does not relax, and for more than ten years, he has been constantly deepening the formation of styles and systems.
(Private Collection)
Kim Kyu-gang uses his systematic oil paintings to create, in fact, "intercepting" a specific period of "time and space" related to the countryside, and further constructing the local context that characterizes the northern part of the Korean Peninsula. The point is that when he created this system of art, he was not present in the context of globalization, if through the mobile Internet, most parts of the world can be synchronized "present" but in different realities and time and space. North Korea, then, is a small part of time and space that is not within this "synchronization." Even North Korea has its own rhythm and mission, and it still does. This premise makes Jin Kuigang's creation invaluable. The fact of globalization as a subject has given contemporary artists that they cannot be "wrapped up" because they are present. At the same time, artists in the north of the Korean Peninsula need to find a way out of another kind of "coercion". In the one-dimensional output of North Korean art for more than three decades, that is, in the presence of works of art and the absence of artists, the outside world has been able to recognize some of the Korean art and its artists that are late or still being created. Among them, they include being able to transcend reality in the current context and find a future path named after artists for the contemporary value of Korean art.
Constructing a "habitable" vernacular situation, but "hiding" the daily life of the countryside. This is the pursuit of Jin Kuigang's landscape oil painting. In his works, he consciously emphasizes the immutable parts of the vernacular world, that is, the various "symbols" of the vernacular context, such as landforms, mountains, rivers, vegetation, settlements, roads, and agriculture. A perfect representation of a local context (context) in the north of the Korean Peninsula. However, in this situation, there is no "daily life", no "life", at most some "appearance" of life, such as red peppers on the roof, drying clothes, harvesting crops, and so on.
It is the lack of "human tracks" and the inability to see signs of people. In his early works, there are more "images" of children going to and from school when they were young, and on the way home or to school, they occasionally draw a cyclist, also on the way home or traveling. The ideologization of the new countryside of Korean-style socialism does not appear in the theme of Kim Kyu-gang's landscape paintings.
Obviously, he has a larger "plan" so that the viewer can really walk into the northern rural context of the Korean Peninsula he constructed, not to appreciate the scenery of the countryside, but to walk into the "world" and "everyday life" of the countryside, so as to truly feel different ethnic groups, different cultures, different historical backgrounds, and of course, different geographical spaces, bringing their own different local contexts, and completely different "lives". Therefore, the context in these paintings is not the "world" described by ideological requirements, but the immutable field and the "everyday" that can be generated by this field.
In order to present the constructed local context in a panoramic way, Jin Kuigang used more than a decade of oil paintings to complete this ideal. Now we see his works, from 2005 to the present, more than 1,000 oil paintings, for the practice and completion of the richness of this landscape theme. In the process, it has experienced the acceptance of North Korean art exports by the Chinese art market. In order to make money, many painters have adapted to the transformation of the market and become painters who specialize in the needs of the market, and many of them are particularly excellent painters, which has become a regret in the history of contemporary Korean art. However, from the very beginning, Kim Kyu-gang's works have adhered to and adhered to his own creative philosophy, so that the outside world can have a deeper understanding of contemporary Korean vernacular realist painting through his works. To this day, Jin Kuigang is still constructing his local context, still perfecting his creative system, and still does not consider the greater benefits that marketization may bring. This is something that almost no contemporary North Korean oil painter can do.