ATO: Beautiful Gift at AP Space

Reality+Image Kim Kang Yong 2011-2121, 2020, Mixed media, 117x91cm.

By ANTHONY HADEN-GUEST November 27, 2024

A bearded Korean was fastidiously airbrushing a hyperrealist portrait of Abraham Lincoln as I walked through AP Space, the gallery on West 25^th Street in New York City, where the work of half a dozen Korean artists is hung and this proved a bang on way to enter the show. Modernism was, of course, not an evolutionary growth in Asian cultures but arrived like a Cadillac speeding through a shrine and in the show you see the very different ways in which these artists absorbed Modernist ideas and developed them in their own art.

Some of the artists directly reference iconic western source material. Like Lee Lee Nam, whose name tends to be coupled with that of Nam June Paik, the first Korean to become prominent in the Western artworld, who worked in West Germany and New York and was a breakthrough figure in both Video and Performance.    

Lee Lee Nam studied Rodin and Giacometti at college and majored in sculpture but moved into media art after observing the power of moving images while teaching anatomy to animation students. His works here include two pieces centered on iconic Western paintings, Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Ear Ring and da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, who he shows being attacked by flamethrowers. “Perhaps I have in me the teachings of Taoism that sees the return to the original purity and simplicity,” says Lee Nam, who views his works as offering a quiet moment in a hurly-burly world

Likewise Park Seo-Bo, who spent a year in Paris in 1961 where he grew close to the Art Informel artists, a parallel group to New York’s Ab Exes, and which included Pierre Soulages and Jean Fautrier. By the mid 60s though he had moved on, was immersing himself in Eastern disciplines and in the early 70s became prominent in Dansaekhwa, a group who painted monochrome abstractions, famously a Western process, but turning it very much to their own ends.

Exploring the tropes of Western Modernism opened up new directions for these artists but they took them very much in their own direction. Or directions.  Park Suk Won uses accumulation, repetition, fragmentation and reassembly to check out his materials. Here he is on the traditional Korean paper, hanji. I tear hanji and adhere it to handmade canvases, which aligns with the sculptural concept of layering, he says. Gaps between the layered paper reveal raw canvas or layers that resemble paths for air or breathing spaces, embodying a beauty of emptiness. Using hanji—processed to retain the texture of wood—amplifies a sense of embracing nature.

Lee Ufan, another member of the group, also founded the avant-garde group Mono-ha, the School of Things, which would become Japan’s first internationally recognized contemporary art movement in the late 60s. We are told that he developed this from Eastern philosophical teachings on being and nothingness. Ufan’s paintings are often a single brushstroke. “The work is never complete, because there is no perfection or completeness,” he declared.

How then, I asked, by way of an interpreter, does Ufan know when it’s time to stop work on a piece?

That, he said, has to do with “a resonance of relationships.” He added. “The interaction between the artwork, the space it occupies, and the visitor’s presence is a key element in my work.”

On to Kim Kang Yong, whose works look like classic hard core Minimalism, like the gridded piece in which most of the cubes have clearly been attached to the surface. Except they haven’t. Move closer, the surface flattens and you’re looking at a feat of paint-handling.

Which is somewhere Donald Judd would not have gone. What led Yong to make this work?

“I wanted to give viewers an intense visual experience unlike anything they’ve encountered before,” Yong said. “It’s true that creating a sense of three-dimensional illusion on a flat surface plays an important role in my work. However, just as crucial as the illusion is the restrained sense of form. Additionally, the cubes I paint are not objects like bricks but rather images formed in the mind. I will continue to break stereotypes in visual art and attempt to cross the boundaries between abstraction and figuration.”

Yong adds that the way he combines his bricks is the way a human body is formed by cells. What does he wish to communicate?

‘In my youth, during the politically tumultuous 1970s and 80s in Korea, I found myself focusing more deeply on the role and significance of individuals,” Yong said. “The idea of many grains of sand coming together to form a single brick felt similar to the way a person is made up of numerous cells, or how many people come together to create a society.”

Upon a second visit to the show I again passed by the bearded Korean, who was now working on a super-large portrait of JFK. The artist, Kang Hyung Koo, makes portraits of historical figures who are alike mostly in their durable fame and who have included Nietsche, Andy Warhol, Van Gogh and Marilyn Monroe. Most are painted from photographs, but not all – he has painted an elderly Marilyn Monroe – and all are executed with convincing hyper-realist exactitude, but sometimes with remarkable detailing. As when he makes the eyes of a subject glimmer.Which  brings me back to Kim Yang Kong’s bricks. These artists have been turned on by Western modernism but are not just trying to replicate it. Was it Jean Cocteau who said the trick to being a star is knowing how far to go too far? WM