Alternative Modernism of Kim Keuntai; Daam Spirit in Art
Introductory preamble: the problematics
Korean painter, Kim Keuntai has usually been classified as a so-called “Dansaekhua” painter in recent years in Korea and also internationally. I’m told that he has also been called more recently as a dansaekhua painter of a ‘post-dansaekhua period’, a kind of a tongue-twister as well as being a brain-twister, if you will. Be that as it may, one thing is clear that there’s serious conceptual issue with this strange notion of ‘dansaekhua’ and its associated namings such as ‘post-dansaekhua’ or ‘post-dansaekhua dansaekhua’. That there is something fish about all these goings-on is supported by this undeniable fact—the fact that ‘dansaekhua’ is simply a Korean Hangeul translation of an English word ‘monochrome painting.’ Until after the year 2000 or some later such as 2003 or 4, history of modern or contemporary Korean Art did not include a nomenclature with this spelling ‘d-a-n-s-a-e-k-h-u-a.’ All the painters (and their painterly outputs) of today’s Korean ‘dansaekhua’ used to be called the Painters of ‘Pyeongmyeonhua’ at least since 1970s in such leading Korean journals as Ghongganji(or ‘Space Magazine’) or ‘Gyegan Misul’(Quarterly Misul) which changed its name around 1990 as Monthly Misul and in smaller art journals like ‘Misul Segye’ (Art World). This historical fact about ‘Korean Pyeongmyeonhua’ will prove to be the very key in any effort to discover if there’s any substance to the alleged claim that ‘Korean dansaekhua’ is a genuinely indigenous Korean modern, or contemporary art, as the case may be. Though fascinating, this is no place to do a genealogical examination of only recently renamed an alleged Korean art movement –namely, ‘Korean dansaekhua.’
Be that as it may, Kim Keuntai does not consider himself dansaekhua painter. Rightly, I think. For, as I shall demonstrate in the confines of this essay, it will undermine and undervalue his artistic achievement as a modern/contemporary painter in being classified as a Korean dansaehua painter. It must also be pointed out that it is entirely possible to read his works are ‘dandaekhua’ paintings, insofar as Korean dansaekhua-cum-pyeongmyeonhua has any sort of global art-historical substance or reality in its being faithful to the aesthetic and ontological dictates of the Standard Modernism à la Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried. However, Kim Keuntai’s paintings can, at the same time, also be read as alternative, nonstandard modernism as formulated by Deleuze and Guattari. Indeed, this is no different from the way Jackson Pollock is read in both ways, as standard and non-standard. I hope to show that this fact about Kim Keuntai will prove to have similarly important art-historical and onto-aesthetic significances as with Jackson Pollok’s case.
Not unlike stock market bubble, it is said that Korean dansaekhua paintings are in great demands at international art fairs and auction houses, the prices soaring as a result. (It has, however, not been shown or disproved that this auction-house craze for Korean dansaekhua paintings is not a result of some concerted intervention on the parts of commercial galleries, sometimes seedy institutions of financial technology, auction houses and some other such outfits. After all, in today’s globalized finance-capitalism, any item of any some artificially chosen brand may be engineered to promote and make it a star performer, a star in that particular market in raising its stock or commodity price in a continuous soar with no ceiling in sight.
In today’s art world, it is no longer possible to just engage in a formalist analyse of a Painter’s works art in establishing his or her artistic achievements in purely aesthetic terms. Likewise, with the case of Kim Keuntai, it will be necessary to consider art-historical contexts, both global and local Korean. For some such reasons as these above mentioned, I’m afraid there will have to be digressions here and there in the course of writing about Kim Keuntai’s Paintings, reading them both in the standard modernist and also non-standard alternative modernist discourses. In roundabout ways, several digressions and lengthy argumentative digressions, I hope to show that in being read as non-standard Deulezean modernism, Kim’s artistic achievement will turn out to be more enduring and indeed future-oriented than his fellow Korean monochrome painters in whose case their works cannot be read as non-standard modernist, while remaining strictly standard modernist whose historical validity had already proven to be obsolete in fact. Bluntly put, the typical Korean dansaekhua has nothing spiritually, aesthetically or technically indigenous Korean in their immanent ontological being, contrary to their claims of local-national artistic identities. They are in fact just the epigones of what is now obsolete standard modernist ideology in Greenbergian version in which all the mantra had been “painterly flatness”. (Indeed, what do you think Korean painters of this ilk (now being called ‘dansaekhua’ painters) had called their works “Pyeongmyeonhua(平面畵)” (which is a literal Korean translation of “flat painting” in Greenberg’s mantra)? It is indeed laughable that one transcribed as “tansaekhua” and some other transcribed as “dansaekhua”, using ‘d’ rather than ‘t”, when both transcriptions refer to the same Western ‘monochrome’. So, the comedic situation in Korea is this: who called Western monochrome painting in Korean translation and gave it a Korean Hangeul name first, the one who used ‘t’ first or the one who used ‘d’ first? I wonder if they copyrighted the Hangeul translations with ‘t’ and ‘d’ ; an intellectually vacuous conflict, if there ever was one. On cannot help but think of the title of Agamben’s book, “Men without Content”: these Korean cognoscenti!!
Anyways, for all these reason above, I beg my readers’ patience and ask for their indulgence in following through my sometimes tortuous explanatory logic and discursive tedium.
[1]Standard and Non-Standard/Alternative Modernisms
1.1) Here, by Standard Modernism I refer to the one as formulated by Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried in the 1950s and early 1960s, especially considering one of the most authoritative and definitive statement of modernism published in 1964 by Fried in his catalog essay of the famous exhibition of “Three American Painters” at Harvard’s Fogg Museum of the same year of 1964. However, the initial modernist movements in the arts, in painting, music and literature began already in the middle of the 19th Century. According to Stanley Cavell, who provided philosophical bearings especially for Michael Fried’s formulation of the Standard Modernism which he inherited from Greenberg, Modernism or Modernist historical consciousness arose roughly in the middle of the 19th century, when the artists in their respective fields, felt the breakdown of the received conventions (of doing art).” ) The modernist artists this historical consciousness refused to paint in the traditional representational conventional idioms; instead of the trickery of the traditional trompe-l’oeil painting, they wanted to paint by becoming faithful to the given ontological conditions of the medium of painting itself…the finitely confine area of flat canvas with its edges and boundaries. Hence, the mantra of “flat painting”, eliminating any and all representational technics and trickeries from the flat surface of painters’ canvas. In some such a way, the history of modernist painting became the history of the successive modernist painters’ inventiveness in creating an absolutely non-representational but flat painterly plane on the flat surface of their canvases. (Yes, indeed, in just such inventiveness in eliminating any and all representational tracs and creating absolutely flat painterly surfaces, Korean dansaekhua painters were just as creative and modernist as their Western counterparts, as Joan Kee is dealing with in her marvelously well written thesis, though ultimately historically and philosophically misguided. For Western modernists, they had good reasons for rejecting their inherited representational convention in painting; but for Korean painters who didn’t inherit that convention and in fact had to learn it as a kind of second language for the first time. So, if they were doing modernist painting, as Joan Kee shows so well, just as well as their Western counterparts, well these Korean tansaekhua painters were doing as Western or Westernized Painters, not as Korean painters. They were not bringing anything Korean native, spiritually, aesthetically or philosophically or otherwise, to their modernist painting. Theirs were a species of Colonial Modernism, if you will. For this very reason, Kim Keuntai is lucky that he is not this sort of dansaekhua painter; indeed, his can be read as Deleuzean alternative modernism and from there on, it is not far off to discover clues hidden in his art works of painting as invisible but nevertheless REAL, immanently real ontologically present virtualities as the future Art, overcoming the nihilism rampant in global contemporary art centered around the so-called Western Global Centers of Art, the colonial center,if you will, which hasn’t completely disappeared, making their presences known invisibly and virtually, sot to speak
Now, in the case of Jackson Pollock, in Michael Fried’s interpretation, he was able to create very first, in world history, absolutely abstract painting by devising an “all-over” and “drip” painting techniques. Before Pollock, such abstract painters as Mondrian had managed to paint paintings of abstraction but not quite absolutely abstract with no references to anything outside in reality. For an image in a painting or a painting as a whole can bear no resemblances to anything else outside (the confines of canvases), yet it could have some references to an object as a symbol or a sign. For example, the all-overness in Pollock’s painting makes it impossible to focus one’s eyes on anyone spot on the surface of his painterly plane, meaning that there’s no representational center of any sort. Thus the lines in Pollock’s “Number One” Painting, for example, constantly moving and filling the surface without any sort of ‘playing the role of signifier with its implied signified presupposed. Therefore, in Deleuzean terminology, Pollock’s lines are mere ‘particles-signifier’ without its signified predetermined.
Seeing Jackson Pollock created Absolutely Abstract Paintings, Kenneth Noland and Frank Stella began making shaped canvases faithfully reiterating the given literal geometric shapes of the given or chosen canvases. Jules Olitski, on the other hand, roughly at the same time made canvases of flat monochromatic color-field paintings as a literal flat canvas (or canvas as a literal object whose surface is of that particular monochrome color), almost creating shaped canvases himself as literal art objects, however not going all the way to their (literal) Objecthood. (This aspect of Olitski will be discussed in the next section in a comparative conjunction with Kim Keuntai’s painting.)
The art historian who planned, curated and organized the exhibition of “Three American Painter” was Michael Fried, then an Assistant Professor of Art History at Harvard in his mid-30s at Harvard’s Fogg Museum in 1964. Fried also wrote the catalog essay, expending half of the essay on Pollock and then the 3 next generation followers of Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Frank Stella. A landmark exhibition and a definitive statement on the Standard Modernist Paining discourse, marking the final period point (Punkt) on the successful and historical removal of the cultural-power status of the International Center of Art to New York City from Paris, France, the move which was begun in the nearly immediate aftermath of the WWII and became a done-deal by the Harvard’s Fogg Museum Exhibition was organized in 1964 by young Fried. Indeed, did someone write a Ph.D. thesis in Art History on “How New York stole the idea of Modern Art from Paris?”
Following and watching how American modernist Painting (sometimes called “Abstract Expressionism” or sometimes “Action Painting” which Greenberg and Fried hated) ended up in Shaped Canvases of Noland, Stella and Olitski, still younger generation painters like Don Judd, Robert Morris and Dan Flavin lamented, “How long can we go on making shaped canvases?” In being faithful to the modernist commitment to the given ontological conditions of an art medium of one’s choice, painters have lost their painterly freedom to fill the empty canvases with their artistic/creative passion where it might lead them to; they were condemned to reiterating the geometric shapes of their canvas edges and flat monochrome colors with no tonality or valuation allowed. Well, if the evolution of modernist painting for two or more decades resulted in the shaped canvases as literal object (of this or that shaped canvases), why then all the pretenses of Paint-ing (as Art-ing)? Let us be honest and begin making just any literal objects! This was an unavoidable logic and it surely means the end of Easel Painting as we have known it in Western Art History. (It is eerily similar to what happened to Modernist Music when the traditional convention of tonal music was felt to have been broken down by the composers of the most advanced historical and musical sensibilities in the middle of the19th Century. In the absence of a new grammar of writing music, all they knew was that the inherited old grammar of tonal music won’t do and has to be rejected in toto. So, the question became how to eliminate any and all traces of tonal music from any new composition. A more or less mechanical compositional process in which there is no room for human composers’ conscious intervention which must have been contaminated by century-long or longer habitual music listening and composting in tonal convention. Serial music of a strict mechanical compositional process was proposed by Arnold Schoenberg. Eventually, not only the pitches in initial Schoenbergian compositional process, but all the other musical variables, such as rhythm, after the first serializing pitches, and then dynamics and eventually all the rest in the form of totally organized music, first completed by Pierre Boulez in late 1940s, something like 1949 or thereabout. But, when completed the totally organized music, “Structure for Two Pianos” could not be heard for its individual compositional notes even for a well-trained musicologists’ ears; all they could hear was just a blocks of sound masses, somewhat like clouds moving across the sky in varying densities, just blocks of LITERAL SOUNDS in varying densities. Afterwards, younger composers called for the abolition of composition as such. Just collect by taping some literal sounds such as “water flowing” in a stream, Car screeching, a Child wailing or a Dog barking or what have you. And then do some phase transformation or something and then replay the sound tape as a New Music. In some such a way Musique concrete was born, a literal music whose compositional procedure is utilization of recorded sounds as raw material; as we mentioned already above, in exactly same way the literal art was born in visual art. From this story of the birth of literal music and literal art, it is easy to see that the notion of minimal art was a stupid naming which did a lot of disservice to the evolution of modern/contemporary arts, culminating in a crisis of nihilism (‘in a situation of “pervasive possibility of fraudulence” in Stanley Cavell’s felicitous wordings).
Western Art, be it modern or contemporary, should have been dead for a long time already, its death has been suspended in a kind of Katechontic delaying action by pseudo-scientific, pseudo-philosophical discourses in the name of postmodernism, neo-avantgarde, media art, digital art or what have you. They are all kinds of desperate efforts on the part of the Katechontic historical forces that want to delay the Jesus’ second coming to solve the chaos of nihilism which prevails all over the world or cosmos in fact. Katechontic forces institute temporary ad hoc ORDERS over the prevailing chaos in order to avoid the COMPLETE CHAOS which would prompt the second coming of the Jesus. Anyways, in today’s art world, intellectually fraudulent theories and pseudo philosophies are Katechontic forces that is preventing the process towards a complete state of chaos in order that a new beginning can be had. Perhaps, Western Art and Artists are prey to the fraudulent play of Katechontic forces. Perhaps, Northeast Asian Oriental spirit of Art, which has managed to stay non-West, preserving its own unique spiritual identity doesn’t have to fear Western Katechontic forces and therefor a genuine Renaissance of Keunine, REAL ART can about only from the Orient, especially from South Korea. I wish to share with you my sighting of such a possibility in thinking about Kim Keuntai’s Art Works of past decade of so. Yes, from a unknown Korean artist, not from Well-established Internationally well-known Korean artists whose names I won’t name, as I think they’re Westernized and Americanized artists whose souls have been sold to the Art-Market Places of the Western Capitalist Centers.
1.2) Deleuze-and-Guattari’s alternative modernism, alternative to Greenberg-Fried version of Standard Modernism provides us with a diametrically different interpretation of Jackson Pollock’s Paintings during Post WWII and 1950s period before his untimely death in 1956. We had occasion above to discuss how Greenberg and Fried in their standard modernist way read Pollock’s “Number One” painting as being the historically-first ever absolutely abstract painting. Yes, their reading is phenomenologically correct; they described what are visible to their sight only. Their reading is from the viewer’s perspective as in Kantian aesthetic judgements, which is all about the viewing subjects’ grammar of taste in appreciating the object of opticality (as his or hers objects of taste). As good formalist Kantians that they (Greenberg and Fried) are, their modernist art works were just the Kantian aesthetic object of appreciation by the subject-viewer. As such theirs is a formalist Kantian aesthetic discourse of modernist painting, paying hardly any attention to the artist-creators’ creative processes such as how he or she his or her relationship with the material (matier) in what sort of mind-and-body conditions. All Greenberg and Fried cared about is that the all-over lines in Pollock’s paintings of this period formed a smooth and flat surface in order to create purely optical effects in becoming the objects of pure opticality.
In contradistinction to Greenberg and Fried, Deleuze and Guattari did not see the all-over lines of Pollock as mere markers of visuality; instead, they saw something dynamic, with directionality, energy and force in Pollock’s lines with haptic effects on the viewers and not just as visual markers for eye-sights alone. In this reading, if true, Pollock’s lines would be composed of invisible elementary particles, whether they be called molecules or atoms or even more elementary. For convenience, let us call them the lines of molecular movements. Now, this interpretation cannot be false, according to modern advanced physics, be a quantum mechanics or much more advanced quantum field theory or even super-string theory or what have you. In visibly, any and all things, big or small, in the whole universe is composed of elementary particles each of which and all of which are at every instant constantly moving about in cosmic forces in and out of all sort of known boundaries, be it the boundaries of human organs or the seemingly solid blocks like rocks or steel blocs or whatever else. As the lines of molecular or particular flows constantly and continuously, invisibly and unknown to our human consciousness, interact and interface with the cosmic forces (in Deleuzean terminology) composed of molecular or elementary particular wave propagations, sometimes becoming one as in Oriental idioms of “Sky and Man in becoming One” or “Cheon-Yin Hap-Yil, 天人合一”). This is what Deleuze and Guattari call “Capturing Cosmic Forces” and nothing else. (If Deleuze and Guattari has studied Oriental Korean or Chinese philosophies, he would have known that this is so, as their own country man Francois Jullien would no doubt concur with me, he himself having studied and become one of the greatest scholar of Ancient Northeast Asian Thoughts.)
Deleuze calls the visible lines of Pollock as sign-particles with its own physical reality (even though invisible) can haptic effects on a human-viewer only when it (the human viewer) becomes a ‘body-without-organ” as a set or assembly of molecules, having become molecularized, if you will. Pollock himself confessed that his all-over lines of haptic energy, force and intensity of certain amplitude comes about or are by his hands-body but without any sort of intention to move this or that way. His hands were moved by itself automatically; the lines were his own making, as it were. He said that these lines were done in a state of alcoholic or even drug-induced state of ‘unsubjectivised’ self which has been lost for that duration. This state of ‘unsubjectivised self’ is equivalent to the state of one’s mind having been emptied in Oriental Zen Buddhist conception. The Deleuzean ‘unsubjectivized self’ is nothing other than the state of ‘Emptiness’, having emptied, having made all installed-software in the form of past education, habits and etc. inoperative for a while, to borrow the idioms from Computer terminology.
It is interesting to note that Greenberg and Fried did not take seriously what the artist himself, Pollock, said how he came up with all-over lines in his absolutely abstract paintings, the moniker they themselves had given. Perhaps, their all too Western rationalism could not stoop down to such ambiguous, possibly superstitious ideas like “unsubjectivized self” that has been lost, unconscious?
Be that as it may, in Zen Buddhism or in Qi-energy-spiritual-exercise-meditation, to enter into an unsubjectivized state of ‘lostness’ self is explicated in terms of a spiritual journey to discover one’s true self or “Jin-Ah”. if so, in their Zenish parlance, or Qi-ghong parlance, for Deleuzean modernist (a non-standard modernist painter) has to learn to enter into some vibratory co-resonance with cosmic waves in order capture cosmic forces (of infinity) within the confines of his canvas of finitude. We know what Zen Masters or Qi-Ghong Masters about discovering one’s true self by first emptying one’s mind. However, this idea of “emptiness” is very ambiguous as an explanatory concept. Now, however, luckily, in the past several decades, a new mathematical science of Chaos Theory emerged. In fact, Deleuze and Guattari’s considerable philosophical achievement in the 1980s and 1990s were all made possible by their leaning on Mathematical Theory of Chaos, coming to call their philosophy “Fractal Ontology” or their Art Theory “Art of Chaosmosis. Stephen Wolinsky calls the so-called Zenish “True Self” is nothing other than the State of Chaos, the state in which cosmic forces fill the universe, the entire cosmos in fact. How can this idea be made sense of? In somewhat the following way:
Human body as an assemblage of molecules (or elementary particles or super stings), in other words, when a human body has become a body-without-organs, the body becomes a mere passage way in which the molecular wave propagation flows and the cosmic forces outside the body become one turbulent chaotic flow from which sooner or later a new order, a new form will automatically, without anyone else’s intervention, be it the God or a human, emerge. This is nothing other than “Ontological foundation of the World, the natural process through which all things, including the world emerges and disappears.” These are in fact the very same terms in terms of which Ancient Northeast Asian sage, Chang Tzu (莊子) said about the Universe, as I will be coming back to it later in this manuscript.
[2]Reading Kim Keuntai as Non-standard Modernist Painter
2.1) Kim Keuntai and Olitski’s Monochrome Paintings: a comparative perspective.
The image on the top left above is the first, Image-2, historically first, absolutely abstract painting, called one of the very greatest achievement in global art history by none other than Greenberg and Fried, the doyen of Standard Modernist theory. Greenberg also called it finest of all the monochrome color field paintings ever done. It is one of the proudest collections of the famed Museum of Modern Art in New York. The other images below the Pollock’s belongs to Kim Keuntai.
Just one cursory look at Olitski and Kim Keuntai will come as a kind of shock to many viewers, as they look eerily similar, as if they done by the same creator. Now what I am saying is that they look VISUALLY to your sight alone very similar. Visually, phenomenological reading of both Kim’s and Pollock works will be the same. What is read in Pollock in a standard modernist way applies almost word for word to phenomenological reading of Kim’s.
As there were invisible something real in Pollock’s seemingly pure opticality, there are things that are invisible and real in Kim’s works as well. Reading these invisible things from Kim’s is automatically non-standard modernist reading and will point toward a future of art, so far uncharted by Western-centers international centers of contemporary art. Then, too, I wish to show that there is something else, a ‘plus-alpha’ to Deleuzean-Guattarian non-standard reading, which will high-light an aspect of indigenous Korean, a uniquely Korean sensibility discoverable in Kim’s works. Indeed, this something peculiarly Korean as an alpha and omega of Korean artistic-cultural identity will be able to blaze an entirely new direction in the global 21st century art, new art flow (or movement) to emanate from Korean to spread all over the world
Olitski revisited in order compare with Kim Keuntai:
First thing about Olitski is that in a standard modernist interpretation he too, as in the case of Pollock, he too was practicing Art as a painter in full commitment to the ontological conditions of his medium –namely, the flat canvas, its boundary and edges, and the materiality of the oil and even brush or roller, as the case might be. With nothing less than moral fervor and honesty, modernist painters wished to paint in full awareness of the literal flatness and framing edges of the artist’s given or chosen canvases. Having rejected any and all representational traces from the confines of one’s canvases, the artist’s greatest challenge is how to fill the empty flat canvas. Filling with Pollock’s all-over lines was one way. There’s another very logical and common-sense way as well: the form is to be determined by the very shape of the canvases. Indeed, his is what early Kenneth Nolan’s and Stella’s paintings turned out to be –namely, the so=called shaped canvases. In that way, both the awareness of the literal flatness and the boundedness of a canvas were simultaneously satisfied, so to speak. Olitski compared what he was trying to do with the natural color of a real apple. The redness of apple belongs to the apple-itself, it has not been colored read over its surface. The color is an essential quality of a thing, in the case of an apple. He wanted his color not on the surface of his painting (on this canvas) but IN the canvas, inseparable from it at a molecular level, as it was.
Well, how did Olitski’s ontological commitments to modernist dictates was manifested in concrete works of his paintings? If you looked at his late 1960s paintings like “Pink Tinge” or “Lavender Liner”, they both rectilinear canvases with longer bases than the height. They are not painted with brush strokes but a flat tone of color ink was applied with a roller, giving them industrial look, as if they were mechanically produced in a factory. It is as if a large enough piece of cloth in this or that color was folded over the surface of a canvas and then stretched over it tightly so that it looks like the natural surface of this canvas itself. Olitski was trying to create the color effect such that it is not color with brush by himself but the color naturally belongs to that canvas’ surface.
As he said what he wanted his colors to, his both paintings of “Lavender Liner” and “Pink Tinge” are just two such shaped literal canvas whose surface floors naturally belong to those very surfaces. If so, then they are just two such literal objects (of being this particular shaped canvases of such and such sizes). Then, what he has done is not, what he produced are not works of art as Painting; he just created some literal object that look like canvases flat with framing edges. No, Olitski was not ready to go that far. He found a way of doing Painting rather than making literal objects. He did so by giving a stealthy, barely visible brush stroke marks on the very edges of a huge canvas. These visible brush marks suspended their becoming mere literal objects and being a painting. He was prolonging the life of easel painting for modernist painters, although it couldn’t be prolonged forever. (This is where Korean dansaekhua painters encounter problems. They were done in standard modernist paradigm of painting. Theirs are painterly objects of pure opticality for the eye sights only. However, as a standard modernist painting, their life span has been already numbered, dead and done for. Is this not how and why Arthur Danto had to write an apologetic ad hoc Katechontic discourse called “Art after the End of Art”?
Now, look at Kim’s images above, after having done that with Olitski’s. Even the stealthily applied small brush srokes at the boundaries and edges look similar to Olitski’s. While on first look both Olitski’s and Kim’s look eerily similar, on closer investigation, there are things not visible to the sight but haptically present, nevertheless. Well, “haptically present’ is a very ambiguous expression; what the hell does it mean? Let us begin again. There two different sorts of visual data which impinge on human eyes. One is perceived by our eye sight purely optically, while there is another which too impinge on our eyes, but not for our eye sights but it exert forces directly on our nerve cells in our retina, a body part after all, thereby becoming haptic or tactile. Therefore, the second way of sensing of the incoming visual data is not for the eye sight and hence not a seeing; it is rather a tactile sensation through its molecular energy-force exertion on our skin (of our retina). While the former is a perception through filtering process of our hard-wired software which enable our ‘seeing’, the latter is accomplished, while the ‘seeing-or perception-enabling software’ is not operative. The latter is thus a sensation through invisible tactile sensing, when the matter-energy wave of a material object exert its force on the nerve cells of the retina in our eyes. Thus, haptic sensation is not a perception, a seeing through our eye sight programs in operation, an invisible sensation in other words.
In Olitski’s case, there’s nothing other than visual seeing; his paintings were just the objects of opticality, pure and simple. His art lives and dies with the fate of Greenberg-Friedian standard modernism, whereas Kim’s case is very different. For in Kim’s case, there’re indeed a host of invisible but REALY present virtual possibilities as potential forces, if you will. Modern physics taught us that the ‘potential forces’ no less REAL just because they are not always activated.
What can we find in closer inspection in Kim Keuntai’s works of painting that are not visible but nevertheless there as REAL potential forces, something that is closer to being a Haptic Kind of sensing and something that cannot be found in Olitski purely optical objects. Let me explain in what follows:
2.2)Kim Keuntai’s Non-standard Modernism
I chanced upon a sentence in one of the previous exhibition catalogs of Kim Keuntai’s. It reads somewhat like this in rough translation: “The mind of the material meets with the painter’s efforts in mutual tuning of each other’s frequencies.” “질료의 마음과 작가의 노력이 주파수를 맞추면서 접점을 찾아내는 과정이 그의 그림으로 이어진다.” As poetic metaphor, it can be a wonderful poetic description of Kim’s artistry, perhaps. However, one would like to see a little bit more concrete explanatory logic than the lovely but vacuous saying. I think a little more, something much more concrete and explanatory in more or less scientific terms can be done about Kim’s paintings.
In the painter’s notes, there’s still something else which might prove to be useful clues to understanding Kim’s artistry. “I wanted to discover my root, my DNA I was born with hard-wired. It is something my body had known all along from the very moment of birth or inception. I want to realize the very Aesthetic that is solely my own in my Art.” I wonder if I am taking too much of a liberty in retranslating his musings in a way that can be more easily explainable in a modern and/or contemporary scientific idioms. Kim Keuntai’s root and DNA must be something properly ‘Korean” which have been lost or forgotten by most modern-day Korean people. (In fact, I am ready to say that 99% of today’s Korean people are more Americanized than are Koreans. They have forgotten what it means to be a Korea in a proper way.) I propose that if and when if we can rediscover the very root and DNA of Korean aesthetic sensibilities and properly formulate this properly Korean into a modern discourse, then from within this discourse the whiteness of Korean white porcelain and also the very tactile sensation one can had from our encounters with Shilla-dynasty period stone sculptures, towers and Buddha statues. I can see that these are the essential or key factors and elements in Kim’s Art, making up his very artic soul as it must be in fact. The very Korean sensibilities, now forgotten by nearly all Koreans themselves, are what Kim wants to give expressions to in some immanent manifestations in his works of painting. Now, it’s time finally to turn to ‘this properly Korean indigenous aesthetic sensibilities’ which require some further explication.
2.2.1) Aesthetics of Fermentation
‘Sakhim’ is a Korean word for fermentation. Fermentation is the single most important Korean food preparation. Kimchi is the best known Korean fermented food. But there are also all sorts of fermented fishes, small and large. The most popular is the fermented anchovies or “myeolhi jeotgal.” Let us pay attention to this simple Korean saying in a sentential form: “Only when properly fermented, it gives its own original tastefulness.” It also implies that the taste from a raw fresh material is not necessarily its (the material’s) original unique taste; it real original essential taste can be had only after a proper fermentation for a proper period of fermentation and waiting with good patience during its fermentation. There is a further truth about fermentation process; one involves the material to be fermented. But another equally important process which occur simultaneously as the material fermentation, be it that of myeolchi, ojing-uh or kimchi or hong-uh, etc; it is a process which involves the subject, the principal subject who is the initiator of and the doer of this fermentation. This person, this individual who is doing the fermentation has to wait, with patience and prayerful mind constantly attuned to the very fermenting process inside her ‘hangari’ (big tall oval Korean earthenware jar the inner and outer walls are porous enough for air as molecularized matter-energy waves propagate free move in and out, in continuous interaction with the cosmic forces outside in the cosmos.) In a way, this person who’s doing the fermenting is fermenting herself during this waiting period. Call it Aesthetics of Waiting Mind, if you will.
The properly Korean Aesthetic Sensibilities arise from this one single key element in traditional Korean Grammar of Taste. One might possibly wonder why I am connecting Korean aesthetic sensibilities with Korean Grammar of Tasting foods. Well, this person is not well educated in the areas of modern aesthetics; in Post-Kantian modern aesthetics, it is all about the grammar of taste. The refined cultivated tastes are capable of distinguishing the subtle differences of the original grapes in wine-tasting. That is indeed what aesthetic judgement is all about; it is not objective in any sense of the word, but it is not for that reason arbitrary, it does demand subjective universality in (aesthetic) judgement, while not materially objective in any scientific-rational way . This key element, this key concept in Korean Grammar of Taste is ‘Fermentation”; it is their fundament key assumption underlying all their aesthetic judgement –that only the properly fermented taste is the Original, Essential Taste in a dish of food or a glass of wine or whatever else rather than its raw material taste when it is fresh or even living. ‘Subjective University’ is a concept or a value accrued in a collective memory as a shared experience over a long historical duration, building up to be collectively shared sensibilities at a common-sensical level and dimension.
2.2.2 Kim Keuntai grind stones into particles to mix with color
To grind stone into particles is nothing other than the Deleuzean concept of “molecularization” of the material with which to forge an art work. Moleclularization is another word for Fermentation, in fact. How so? Well, when a fermentation of some material raw stuff such as anchovis has been done properly, the raw form of the original material has lost their raw form, thus becoming molecularized, so to speak. In becoming molecularized, the original stone has become kind of fermented, losing its raw shape and beginning to be able to breathe out in consonance with the other molecular vibratory flows in the cosmos. Think wine-making in this very way, as a fermenting-molercularization process. The meaning of Original Proper Taste in a perfectly fermented grape wine means the potential tastefulness as a real but virtual immanence is fully given realized in actuality as an actually drinkable species of wine.
Thus, in Korean Art production or creation, the aim is to release the material’s original, potentially its best possilities, into full blossom. We’ve already mentioned the second fermentation process, other than the material fermentation; this time, involving the very subject himself or herself who is the Subject-agent of doing the fermentation. Fermentation takes time and this waiting time cannot be measured in time, as there’s no equation to it, because the very process of natural fermentation is dependent upon many different multivariate variables such as weather, dampness, temperature, terrain, and so forth. No one variable is predictable year to year or season to season. The Subject-agent as the fermenter has to build up a kind of constancy in min and spirit, attentive to the changing variable conditions to the on-going fermentation process. Occasional intervention might be necessary, but the impulse to intervene has to be moderated as the material in being fermented has differing characteristic propensities or material personalities of its own. It is not unlike raising a human child who may be more or less temperamental. An invariable constancy, a sense of calmness in character is required to be attentive and caring at all times in waiting for the fermentation process to proceed of its own natural accord. In other words, waiting is not a simple time-watch type of time being expended. It is nothing less than a personal fermentation of the self, a spiritually, mentally and bodily exacting kind of spiritual exercise called ‘Suhaengg” in Korean parlance. Personal fermentation is in short a maturation process as a human being. There is a Korean saying, “Become a human first before becoming an artist.” It is a totally different kind of mentality in Orient from that in the West; whereas, in the West originality and creativity is what they look for as the greatest value in an artistically creative activities, willing to award and praise originality for its own sake, willing to overlook even his or her criminality as even as murdering another innocent human being. Even an evil character is overlooked and is praised for his genius in the West; that is not the case in traditional Orient. Thus the aesthetics of waiting with constancy and patience is just the aesthetics of attentive waiting.
However, what does one really mean by this idea of fermenting one’s mind and/or his or her self. In order to give this a scientific explanation, we need to recall Deleuzean concept of the ‘body-without-organs’ which means the molecularized body as an assembly of molecules in stead of as one composed of organs such as head, lungs, heart, kidney and so forth. These molecules ignore boundaries of bodily organs, in and out of the body as a matter of fact, constantly and already in continuous interaction and interface with the cosmic forces in wave propagations in wave packets of differing hierarchical orders. Our body as an assembly of molecules rather than of organs is already is no longer our (my) body, it is already an integral part of the cosmos, in its grand chaotic undulations and flows as cosmic forces. In such a molecularized body, there is no inside or outside. There’s only a flow of matter-energy-wave propagation. As such, the artist, Kim Keuntai’s body as an assembly of molecules which composes his organs and ultimately his body will be able to interact with cosmic matter-energy-waves which fill the universe in a molecule to molecule kind of dynamic interactions in consonance and also in dissonance and interferences.
In some such ways, in Aesthetics of Fermentation, it is all about the molecularized inorganic vitality as the fundamental dynamics of the cosmic force. Because, the inorganic vitality which a body-without-organs radiate in inorganic matter-wave propagations is much more fundamental than the bio-organic life energy. Therefore, a body as an assembly of molecules, in such a bodily state, the artist does not create artificially, arting act as a willful intending act, but the artist as an assemblage of molecules, in his state of molecularization, he will be able to flow with the cosmic forces becoming one-flow, as it were, thus capturing the infinite of the cosmic forces within the finite (bounded confines of a canvas). This capturing of the infinite of the cosmic forces is not done willfully by any sort of intention; rather, it is to let a new form, new order, self-emerge in the midst of the chaos of cosmic forces filling the universe. It is to let the natural processes through which all things, including the world emerge and disappear. This theory of chaos, as a new mathematics only less than 50 years ago in the name of fractal ontology, is fractal geometry or fractal algorithm. However, in ancient China, more than 5000 years ago, the Chinese came up with the theory of continuous change. In fact, the Book of Change is nothing other than the famous I-Ching.
Anyways, the new mathematics of Chaos Theory as well as Chinese Book of Change has one fundamental axion…that any and all things in Universe self-emerges and self-dissipates by having Qi-energy vibratory waves come together or by scattering. When collected, a new order emerges out of the chaos; when dispersed, that new order disappears into dissipated fog of Qi-energy waves. If everything in universe as huge as galaxies or Himalaya Mountains or as small and miniscule as viruses or bacteria or atoms, they are all composed of Qi-energies (in its wave-particle dualities as Chuang Tzu said in his book, then it is exactly the same theory as the most advanced Elementary Particle Physical theory of Super String. Well, is this Chang Tzu’s Qi philosophical theory not the one as the mathematical theory of chaos and also no different from the Deleuzean-Guattarian alternative modernist art discourse of capturing cosmic forces via molecularization as its (ontological) condition?
2.2.3.Korean white porcelains: Aesthetics of Daam tone of “ White”
Korean white porcelain is very different from Chinese or Japanese ones. While Chinese and Japnese white porcelains are indeed white in color, the white color of Korean white porcelain is pure white, but rather slightly gray-white or milk-white, a tone lower in its whiteness. As such, Zeng He’s collection of drawings and patterns on Chinese or Japanese white porcelains look brilliantly colorful as they were drawn on the white surface, whereas Korean ones have subdued look, a tone understated, therefore it seems to be in a state of calm daamness –a daam white, a refrained and therefor at the same time a sense of refinement is also implied.
A refrained Korean White seems to be the look of a white color when placed under a shadow rather than under the direct light of the Sun. It is a visual phenomenon when under a shadow. Whiteness has the qi-energy-character of Yang, whereas Chinese Ink has the qi-energy-character of Yin; therefore, by inserting Yin qi-energy flow into the Yang character of White base, an altogether newly transformed Yinish White was let to emerge and made the usual white into a gray-white. This is the meaning of gray-white. This process too can be looked upon as a kind of fermentation process. As a result of fermenting the usual white, it turned into a gray white of calmness and daamness. It has become a daam white, if you will. In short, the grey white of Korean white porcelains is white of daambak taste or daam taste as a result of fermention (of the white).
If we consider Kim Keuntai’s covering of his flat canvas surface with ground stone particles mixed with color ink is to do Art, to do Painting according to the dictates of Korean Aesthetic Grammar of Fermentation by way of moleclularization of the stone-material; then the kind of Korean white porcelain-like haptic materiality he tried to effectuate on the surface of his canvas can be persuasively explained within the framework of Korean, uniquely and properly Korean aesthetics of fermentation. The presupposed condition for haptic sensation is the molecularization of the material, the matier itself. For, only then, in its interaction with the cosmic forces (of molecular or other particular vibratory wave propagations in multiple wave packets of differing hierarchical levels), the raw material taste is fermented to give off at the end what should be its own Original taste, the immanently essential taste.
[3] Aesthetics of Fermentation, Art of Daam Spirt: New Art Movement of Qiosmosis to emerge from Korea
In conclusion, I suggest that, only within the Korean aesthetics of Fermentation, can a non-standard modernist reading of Kim Keuntai’s be given as exceptional art works that are capable of overcoming the kind of nihilism pervasive in today’s global art world and art markets, resurrecting the true art spirit. Furthermore, what is pursed in Arting activities in Aesthetics of Fermentation is not to create anything with formal beauty as such; rather, it is to create the effects of ‘daamness’ in the art works. In this way, the Aesthetics of Fermentation is fundamentally and radically different the formalist modern Aesthetics which has been a short-cut to the rampant commodity aesthetics of today’s global world under the most evil and hypocritical kind of Capitalism (of Anglo-American version). Whereas the commodity aesthetics via formalist modern aesthetics purse ‘beauty’, the sellable ‘beauty’; the Aesthetics of Korean Fermentation pursues the effects of daamness.
As a matter of fact, a brilliant French Sinologist-cum-philosopher, Francois Jullien has already said as much in his several books, including “Access and Detour: Strategies for Meaning in China and Greece” and “The Nude: Chinese Art and Western Aesthetics”. He showed that the Chinese had no need for such a Western discipline as Aesthetics in order to do Art; they did not pursue to create ‘the beautiful’ but rather to create the effects of daamness in their poetry, in their music and in their painting. However, Jullien has not been quite successful in elucidating the ways or methods by ways of which the ancient Chinese sense of “daamness” could be achieved in scientific terms, if you will. I suggest that such a sense of daamness can be gotten and its conception more or less scientifically explained, now that we have fractal ontology, chaos theory and Deleuzean modernism of the alternative (to the Greenbergian standard version) kind.
3.1) Towards a New Art Theory of Qi-Osmosis
Qi is an important key concept in the traditional East Asian Medical practices from at least more than two thousand years ago. Yet, today, since the introduction of Western modern medical practices, even East Asians became suspicious of the very concept of Qi, finding it scientifically unproven. Yet, traditional East Asian medical practitioners keep diagnosing in terms of this unscientific concept of Qi and have been able to successfully treat many medical symptoms that Western modern medical practices were unable to treat. So, why now should a modern East Asian artist turn to Qi-gohng for new artistic inspirations? For one thing, all over the world, there’s a widespread interest in this ancient Qi-gohng meditation practices, finding it not only useful and effective in maintaining and improving bodily health and overall wellbeing but also in his mental and emotional wellbeing.
Now is the time that we re-examine this body-spiritual practice of Oriental Qi-gohng and how some Korean artists are doing Art as an aspect of Qi-spiritual discipline. Maybe, just maybe, it is here in Oriental Qi-gohng, we can find the exit point from the pervasive nihilism under grip of which modern civilization is mired, that very exit point which both Heidegger and Agamben were frantically looking from within the spiritual resources of the West. Both these great thinkers despaired to finding such an exit from within their own Western tradition. The solution may lie elsewhere, I suggest, and I believe that Oriental Qi-gohng is one such. Deleuze himself suggested that modernism didn’t necessarily mean nihilistic dead end if and when modernist art looked elsewhere to “capturing cosmic forces” instead of the Greenberg-Friedian aesthetic purism. What Deleuze didn’t know was that “capuring cosmic forces” is precisely what ancient East Asian arts pursued as their artistic goal “becoming one with the sky(天人合一)” instead of some artificial “aesthetic” perfection.
3.2) What is Qi, after all?
The concept of Qi is notoriously slippery. No scientific instrument ever observed the actual flow of Qi-energy as some particular physical phenomenon, being neither electromagnetic nor electrochemical. How then did ancient East Asians conceive of this strange and slippery phenomenon called Qi-energy-forces? I believe the best definition of Qi is to be found in Chuang Tzu. More than two thousand years ago, in ancient Northeast Asia, Chuang Tzu had a scientific theory of cosmos; yes, he was doing cosmology, nothing less, formulating his theory in terms of Qi alone. This is what he said: The Universe itself and everything in it are created when Qi forces are assembled together in condensation and they cease to exist when the once assembled Qi forces scatter or disperse. This statement of Chuang Tzu remained opaque and seemed unscientific for a long time. But now against the theoretical backdrop of the most advanced Particle Physics called ‘Super String Theory’, Chuang Tzu’s above-mentioned statement seems self-evident in the following way. Qi force has always been understood as wave propagation in flowing forms and any wave propagation is a result of some vibration or trembling, as it were. Therefore, Qi is basically a ‘trembling’ or ‘vibrating’ wave/particle duality. All moving waves can resonate together and form a wave packet which is then a stronger and larger wave of its own frequency, different from component superimposed waves. In such a stepwise way, waves become stronger and bigger and faster, or becomes slower and denser at each higher level of superimposition, a process that can go on and on for infinitely many times. The outcome might be an ocean or a pond, a mountain or a valley. Even all solid matters are ultimately composed of self-oscillating or trembling superstrings, according to the Super String Theory. Like Chuang Tzu’s Qi, superstring is a string, as in a string instrument, which tremble and oscillate, when it is pressed with a finger or bow across the length of it with some force. Depending on the location of the string and the force with which it is pressed, the string will sound with different amplitude, harmony, color and texture. In the case of Super String theory, it creates, not a soundwave, but a matter wave, so to speak, while sound too is a matter wave as a matter of fact as light is a matter wave of photons. All kinds of self-vibrating entities, all composed of the minute unit of vibrating superstrings, fill the universe in one huge vast chaotic movements of flowing or spreading, the whole thing also in vibration of trembling mode. Now what chaos theory says is that in any chaotic situation, there are always local orders, these local orders constantly emerging voluntarily and dispersing. It is a kind of movement of constant emergence and disappearance, assemblage and dispersal.
The voluntary and automatic emergence of an order or form is the result of everything else in one big chaos are all self-vibrating and thus emitting waves such that they can all mutually superimpose on top of one another either in consonance or dissonance. So, waves of right frequencies resonate and begin to form a wave packet and on its way to self-forming orders, although it will sooner or later disperse into chaos and then into a new formation sooner or later, and so on and on, repeating such formation and deconstruction in eternal repetition. This is the chaos theory of universe.
As such, Qi can be looked upon as the energy flow of superstring vibratory motions. That is why Qi forces, in their interactive operations, are beyond the sense organs of human body. Only the body with organs in human is capable macro sensation in daily lives where classical physical laws such as Newton’s or Maxwell’s are in operative modes; this body with organs, however, are incapable of sensing the molecular or lower-level particle movements at the level of atoms and stings. However, if and when a man is capable of becoming a body-without-organs, then he is just a huge set of micro-particle assemblages and therefore he is capable, not in the sense of surface awareness, of interacting and interfacing with the particular movements in and out of his body’s organic boundaries. Leibnitz called this micro-sensation a ‘petite sensation’ beyond human consciousness and can only be logically inferred, indirectly as it were. In ancient East Asia, however, they discovered a way or method whereby such Leibnitzean petite or micro sensation could become aware. In other words, they discovered the method of becoming a body-without-organ through body-spiritual discipline of Qi-gohng whereby the practitioner erase his surface consciousness by putting all the perceptual and conceptual operation in quiet or inoperative mode, by putting stop to all of such intellectual, emotional and conscious operations. In East Asian Qi-gohng jargon, it is to make one mind ‘empty’; then at least a modicum of or a faint trace of micro-sensation at the molecular level, his body having become a body-without-organs as just a huge assemblage of vibrating micro-particle movements. Faint and beyond human macro perception and sensation, those petite sensation of micro-particle movements are what are fundament to all existence, as an integral part of the cosmic forces, after all. It is that FUNDAMENTAL particular interactive sensations about which this Korean Artist, Kim Keuntai longed to glimpse and enter into an interactive cosmic dance with. Clearly, what Kim longs for cannot be represented in any sort of figurative painting, for it is a process beyond human perception.
This, however, Kim could venture into doing. Get into that mode of becoming a “body without organ” of just micro-particular movements and let his body enter into that cosmic dance, into the chaotic currents of cosmic forces and let his body ride the turbulent chaotic currents and become a part of an autopoietic self-emerging of a new rhythmic flow, a newly territorializing force (rhythm). Kim was able to get into such a body-spiritual mode of “emptiness of mind” through long periods of Qi-gohng disciplinary exercises as well as some hard-wired Shamanic DNA-enabled spiritual powers, perhaps.
3.3) Painting through Qi-chaosmosis
‘Chaosmosis’ is a neologism coined by Deleuze in analogy to ‘molecular chemical process through which a new higher order or form emerges by itself without any sort of external control exercising over it. So, the term refers to the process of self-emerging order in any initial state of chaos. Likewise, I coined still another term, this time, “Qi-chaosmosis,” considering Qi as the basic most fundamental unit of independently vibrating string out of which the universe as well as everything inside it are created in self-emergence for a duration only to disappear into chaos so that a new combination and new form can emerge anew.
So, then, how does a Painter make use of Qi-chaosmosis in his Act of Painting? Somewhat in the following way:
As in all cases of Chaos Theory, the initial condition is importation. In Kim’s painting, it is the very first Brush work –where on the canvas surface, with what force and directionality? Basically, when he puts down a point with his brush or draw a line called Hoek(劃), he is putting down a very active Vector onto until then a calm state of equilibrium, as the empty sheet of paper too is filled with zillions of vibrating string-particles. His brush brings zillions of vectorial moving vibrating particles too. The vectors from two separate sets of vectorial particles collide and interact to create a catastrophic event into a greater chaos. Once the initial state of chaos is created with the very first brush work, as in Paul Klee’s ‘Grey Point’, chaotic currents begin to flow in movements; once such an active movement of particular flow is formed, then the second and third brush work is voluntarily guided by the flowing movement of the current, as it would have a rough direction and force. In such a way, all furth