Lee Kwang-Ho’s representational painting begins by hyper-realistically describing the exterior subject. However, it does much more than parodying the subject. Not only what’s shown in the painting is similar to the objects outside the picture, but also it begins there and goes further. This means that formative reproduction might connote resemblance, but being similar does not result in reemergence. Isn’t the world of picture never fully absorbed or occupied by reproduction? Perhaps the artist is repeating his questions on the subject regarding how to be immersed in the process of depicting it and its method. There is the distance between the subject and the artist, the picture excluded from drama, unimportant object and landscape, the figurative exposure of abstract brushstrokes, persistent observation and dull descriptions, and the seeking of tactile screen concerning the skin’s texture. It vibrates.
He painted cactus with greatly expanded size and natural landscape by contemplating it from certain distance. Both of them are drawn spontaneously in some sort of distance. These cactuses and landscape, very close to the nucleus of the subject, are everyday objects. Both represent the presence of vegetable property and are nature. The eyes and hands that used to relentlessly capture the figure’s skin and clothing’s surface texture naturally moved to the skin of cactus. The artist discovered cactus as a subject while he was exploring how to visualize all things’ skin and their texture. He picked specific cactus species that are very small in size and painted by enlarging them. After taking the photographs, he painted the subject by simultaneously observing and imitating. In this case, I think that other sensational forces sprout from the way photography and painting agree with, overlap, and borrow from each other. He lays a variety of techniques on the surface and creates delicate differences of pictorial sensuality. The difference between each shape and texture changes the technique and usage of the brushes, and the speed of the painting also becomes different. He approached the cactus microscopically. The intense, sharp and determined observation compels the cactus to be the only thing to encounter a white background. It certainly is a subject that could be called or be known as cactus, but it became a riddle-like object that cannot be possibly understood. We know nothing about the subject. However, lexically we recall its academic name. All the subjects are coincidental, labyrinthine, abstruse, and mysterious. A picture illustrates, as you already know, solely all the subjects’ skin that seems to be cut into thin pieces. Nonetheless, this surface is a passage that lets it move to its interior or exterior spaces. In addition, a picture ventilates the experiential fact that is widely known or is considered as widely known. We relook at the cactus through Lee Kwang-Ho’s cactus painting. We recollect. From what I have seen and known, the contrast and overlap happen. He sticks in the surface of the cactus by enlarging it enormously. He puffed out the small cactus. All pictures are magical and abstract like this. The skin of the cactus is smooth but severely uneven. It is fully covered with white fluffy spines, and the chunks like sarcoma are attached like bumps. Grafting between different beings is specialty of cactus, and it is all the plants’ openness. In this way, plants do not have boundary. Vertically, the vigor of the cactus which rises up like a tower and holds like a phallus is dignified, but its skin is somewhat creepy and grotesque. The texture like intestines, the cactus’ stems that became erect like genital, and chunks like malignant tumors proliferate. The slippery, firm and stiff cactus is dry with sharp thorns and fine fluffy spines. Therefore, this painting gives not only strong visuality, but also subtle tactile sensation. We grope for the skin of the cactus with our hands. No, we should not. The fluffy needles and sharp spikes will injure us. This is a painting that inculcates psychologically quiet fear or phobia. This picture, in fact, leaves psychologically bigger trail than appealing to the retina. It is a picture that is difficult to name as something. Certainly, it is cactus. Nevertheless, what is this painting talking about the cactus? What can it talk about? Its narrative is absent, but through cactus, there wanders a vague desire that cannot be put into words. Is not the artist showing his inner unrelieved desire with texture through cactus?
In fact, there is no content to this painting. It is prosaic, practical and cold. By sticking only to the skin of the cactus, the problem of how to stubbornly depict, explore and draw precedes before the narrative. What he wants, for example, is a novel by Ha Il-ji. His style of writing is describing all the small details without the intrusion of any senses. The small details are everything. With triviality, the writer smothers soft emotion or conventional feeling, huge discussion or drama, and bombastic topic or ideology. He fills with obsessiveness. There, only the viewer’s somewhat absolute distance exists. The distance felt from Lee Kwang-Ho’s painting is like this. In my opinion, it seems like the notion of some ‘distance’ was very important in the previous works of Lee Kwang-Ho. If a picture is fulfilled as an act in the distance between itself and a certain subject and within the distance of vision, how to create this distance and vision is a meaningful act. For me, only Lee Kwang-Ho himself, as the only one who sees the subject, showed the secretive and ambiguous distance of vision. However, it is also somewhat dreary, amorous, dim, and sorrowful sight.
Instead of being obsessed to the subject, the artist turns to the issue of attitude towards looking at it
The obsessive drawing and copying which replace meaninglessness represent a kind of lethargy. To a certain extent, he comes close to the subject senselessly and ghostly. Within the certain distance between the artist and the subject, the artist paints as being parasitic on the skin or spreading like fungi. He caresses the skin of the object. Sensually, he favors the skin. All living organisms’ skin is full of the overlapping and slack of wrinkles from the vital activity. Paintings with enlarged parts of plants are frequent, and the flower paintings by Georgia O’Keefe come to people’s mind at first from a common sense standpoint; however, I associate them with Kim Hong Joo’s flower petals. Elaborately painted stains that seem to embroider and color into the canvas with slender brushstrokes cunningly illustrate the petals, flowers, and genitals before one knows. Without knowing what the subject is and becoming obsessed with details, one loses and forgets what he or she is looking at. Then, one re-realizes the subject as the flower petals at a certain distance. On the other hand, Lee Kwang-Ho does not hide the subject to be cactus. No, he presents the evidence openly. In this case, this evidence is not for showing off the existence of the cactus but for the texture of its skin, which cannot be perceived even if we immerse ourselves into the work. It is fascinating but somehow uncomfortable. It cannot be fully perceived even if we go closer in order to perceive further.
His landscape paintings are visually extremely boring, but its system of drawing is comparatively different from the cactus painting. They keenly show the moves of the eyes that cross quickly and ephemerally. While the cactus paintings seem endlessly slow and tardy, the intervention of time in his landscapes is crucial. He painted the places by looking at the photographs that he took after visiting them in person. These landscapes are commonplace views of any Korean natural landscape, which could be considered as nothing. At the same time, depending on the ambience of light and air, the landscapes appear a little bit different from each other. He chose that scenery. The reason seems to be unrelated to what the previous, common landscape paintings had shown. The sceneries are not beautiful, unaffected, or sublime. He chose the landscape as his subject matter when he met the one that aroused so-called ‘emotion’. In fact, emotion can be felt from every subject. It is a tremendously subjective issue and has mystic and shamanistic dimensions to it as well. Landscapes that bring emotion suggest the places that substitute for one’s vague desire. These landscapes are discovered by chance.
There is sobbing grass and the eyes that fleeting swiftly as the transient wind blows. The sight abruptly went into the landscape. The abstract brushstrokes flow rhythmically and emotional brushstrokes dance. Compare to cactus, this landscape is much more autonomous and individual. It depicts a constantly ordinary and meaningless place, and boring and dry landscape; however, it also feels hazy with dreamlike colors. The artist caresses the skin of various grass and trees. It looks like one part of the cactus, fully covered with fluffy spines, stretched out and has been forced to become a landscape. This painting, too, seeks the methodology, the act of painting itself, and making brushstrokes, more than definite content. When looking closely into the landscape, the completely abstract brushstrokes will meet circling and rampages. From nearby this painting is abstract, but from a certain distance, it is hyper-realistic. As a matter of fact, all pictures are materials when looked that closely and become images when looked farther away. Nevertheless, consciously mixing figuration and abstraction and playing the border between these two regarding time and distance, and remembering and forgetting are prominent in his recent works.
Lee Kwang-Ho’s recent works emphasize how to make brushstrokes, instead of what to paint, as well as leaving out possibly all the language and concept. Above all, this tactile painting seems like he wants to deliver the texture of the object that the artist’s body feels through the brushstrokes in its entirety. Sensational painting!
A picture is, before everything else, a matter that is related to exterior world/subject and the artist’s body. The artist sees and feels the given exterior world through his body. Translating this into a screen is a picture. Hence, depicting a picture is intervened by immensely fine and delicate terms and physical condition. Our body perceives as we exercise. Seeing through the eyes does much more than simply perceiving to brain or thinking. It results from the sensation of movement. His paintings bring back the question of painting’s direction and artist’s status in today’s fast-changing cultural environment. It is a picture about pictures, a kind that characterizes “meta picture’. Today, painting is a forum in which conceptual thing and perceptual thing directly encounter each other, and it continues the exercise that can simultaneously include non-conceptual, body-nature exercise. Moreover, by looking at this viewpoint, the essence of painting cannot be reduced into any particular side from flatness, form, color, or conceptualism, as these concepts once were emphasized during Modernism. Instead, the essence can only be regulated by the historical transformation of unique qualities that are formed in the process of all the previously considered concepts’ facing each other and overlapping. In this case, it is no exaggeration to say that the essence of painting lies upon versatility and plurality, and the strained relation itself that stemmed from them. Lee Kwang-Ho’s painting situates itself at a certain point within that essence and creates strong impact.
Park Yeong Taek (Art Critic, Professor at Kyonggi University)
Translated (Draft) by HeeJin Park