Jung Moon Kyung: Crititque English

Two Worlds, or Beyond

-Short note on Moon Kyung Jung’s new works

Kyung-hwan Yeo | Art Theory, Curator

1.

“I understand at that moment. We are having a wonderful journey together but we are mere masses of metal destined to respective orbits in solitude. From far, it looks beautiful, like shooting stars, but in reality we are only beings like prisoners who are respectively locked up in one’s own cell and can go nowhere. When the orbits of two satellites coincidentally being overlapped, we can face each other and may open our minds, be of one mind. Nonetheless, it occurs in the twinkling of an eye and the next moment, we are in absolute isolation. Until one burns oneself and becomes zero.”

in Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami

2.

My imaging of the thick matière created by overlapped layers of collages and the gravity of the intense color like ‘Black’ pictures, ‘Light’ pictures and ‘Red’ Series soon disappeared as I opened the door of the Artist Moon Kyung Jung’s studio. The air in the atelier was light and its light was warm. It was, however, not only because of its physical condition, air or light. The unidentifiable warmth of ambiguity was vibrating from the new works on a worktable and it was close to the queer hospitality of the artist who welcomed me (or the other)—while I was approaching towards the works—but hesitated to show her face. Aligned one another, the canvases are made out of frames woven from silk, instead of canvas, and supported by wood panels underneath them; a single piece is comprised of a silk-woven canvas and another picture arranged onto the wood panel. A picture on a silk canvas called Gyeon-hwa and a background picture of collages and drawings, together with the space between them, create a combination that is ordinary but coincidental.

3.

For one month from November 2013 on, Moon Kyung Jung stayed in the International Residency at the Vermont Studio Center, Vermont, U.S. and it was the time that she initiated this new series in full-scale. Leaving behind daily life packed with lectures and home, the artist was inspired by harmony between the complete solitude at the countryside studio abroad and the vigorous communication with colleagues and visiting artists in Vermont; despite of its short term, she had an invaluable chance to reify and experiment with the new concept that she had conceived for new works. First used in her career in 2012 for the illustrations of a book about the traditional Korean dance, Gyeon-hwa practices are the same line of works with her use of traditional Korean materials—Hanji, traditional Korean paper made from mulberry trees, Madae, burlap-woven bag but also differentiated from her previous ones. Gyeon or silk is transparent but semitransparent simultaneously, fragile but strongly present, traditional but modern material. The artist has inquired about her own way in the midst of polarities surrounding her—home and abroad, home and work life, Eastern and Western painting as her practices are in flux along the diverging and converging passages. Thus, the sophisticated and intricate layers of Gyeon become a metaphor for her journey and a symbol, at the same time, of the space that is inwardly open so as to step towards another world.

4.

Collage is Moon Kyung Jung’s trademark, a strategy of imagery for conflicts between different identities in herself and points of creations emerged by these conflicts. It is another interesting point to observe how collages are transformed and repeated. On a background picture, pasting fragments cut from newspapers or colored papers, the artist combines collages with drawings at random—drawings about very mundane but fragmented memories—such as the uniform worn when she was high school student or the cornice of the old palace where the drawing contest was hold. Gyeon-hwa reveals the traces that such past unconsciousness is edited and reconstructed by the present self. The space between the background picture and Gyeon-hwa embodies a kind of automatism collage underlying her oeuvres, which unveils the very mechanism of memory being consigned to oblivion and concealment through time.

5.

It is difficult that any one readily believes in truthness of pure art. Art may not be grandiose nor powerful. When myths around art being peeled off, what is left would be a confession about endless abjection on the existence of human beings and the incapability of art which becomes vulnerable to non-transparency of the enormous world. If still art can convey meanings, it is upon the endeavors to revolve without a halt around the space between the non-transparent world and the transparent self and record this process. The artist Moon Kyung Jung never stops the journey. In the process of harmonizing the two worlds and facing incessant discordances, she still finds her road and never stops her orbit to the unknown. It will be: ‘Until one burns oneself and becomes zero.’

Formative Language as an Exploration for Identity

Park, Cheol-hwa (Professor, College of Art, Chung-ang University)

There are many conceptual frames such as representation, expression, form and system for explaining the secret of art works, but none of them seems to be an answer with universal persuasive force. The fact that there is no answer to a secret sounds unfortunate but, on the other hand, it can be a fortune. Although it may be regretful to have to embrace uncertainty with no clear answer, it is exciting that we may continue new exploration for unraveling secrets. This is why people compare art to a journey. Unceasing human efforts to find new features of beings and the world, that is, the journey of their souls are the essential nature of art.

Art after the French Revolution, namely, modern art find the meaning of its existence in the creation of ‘newness.’ While art in the old regime before the Revolution was primarily close to techniques for decorating the world, modern art was an adventure that left the old world to search for a new world by raising questions about the existing world and life itself. In many cases, they were parting as severing ties with old and, at the same time, embracing the new. Anyway, it was a mission and a privilege given to modern art to cast away the yoke of old-fashioned customs, to deny stiffened sense and perception, and to set out on a journey to find the possibility of new life and a new world. They leave in order to be new. This point was summarized by the words “Man has to wander as long as he struggles” in the great German writer Goethe’s Faust.

Long ago, Moon Kyung Jung explained her works by using the theme ‘road.’ “My work in the past rubbed out layered colors and left the trace of a road in the empty space, and then drew something and wiped it away. It was giving shape to the uncertain road of life. At this time, I tried to depict my way roaming around the absolute value in my work.” In fact, paper or canvas confronted by the artist is a mirror reflecting one’s soul, and lines and colors running on it may be one’s gestures for figuring out the face of the soul, namely, one’s own identity. Of course, identity is not a fixed entity. Like nature, a being continues to change and be in motions. This is why art is a journey that is started newly every moment. I am ‘I of the present’ and not I. ‘True I’ can be met only through death, and we as beings are continuously evolving into a ‘new I.’ It is to meet ego who reaches the remotest and sublimes to the highest.

Moon Kyung Jung’s works show the journey of such changes and generations. She majored in Korean paintings, but went over to New York early in her 20s and studied Western painting there. Since then, she has built her own world while moving the base of her work and life between Korea and the U.S. several times. Using various materials including paper and canvas, as well as various colors and techniques, her work traverses East and West, arts and realities, traditions and experiments, and construction and dismantlement. Sometimes adding and sometimes removing, she explores an image exposed at a certain moment. The image must be her ego itself.

As mentioned above, however, ego is neither fixed nor single. In this sense, ego is something familiar and, at the same time, strange. As soon as it is named, its face is changed, and no sooner is it thought to have been caught than it slips away. In this way, ego is the composite generation of ‘the unknown.’ This is why Moon Kyung Jung calls her recent work ‘Journey to the Unknown.’ She is saying that the possibility to meet the ‘true I’ is obtained only through denying and leaving the ‘I of the present.’ Searching for the identity and the face of the soul through denial and generation is the journey as an art.

Her recent works are collages. The materials of her collages are not special but rather ordinary mundane things that we can see around easily. She starts from daily life. In a word, our ego cannot leave daily life, and even if it leaves daily life, in the end, it returns to it as all journeys in great myths do. Of course, it assumes a more mature ego on returning. Moon Kyung Jung’s collages are in essence of a journey. By attaching, detaching and moving daily things, she is taking out her familiar ego and moving it to a new place and, through this, she is finding another ego. In this sense, it is exact and keen that Moon Kyung Jung summarizes her collages as “one plus one is one.”

Accordingly, her collages are a ritual of love to daily life. Leaving daily life through parting from the familiar ego is an adventure of existence for ‘being born again’ with the daily life. Without such an adventure, daily life is nothing but a prison to the ego and our ego can attain ‘flowing freedom’ as a possibility of generation. Therefore, genuine leaving is love that is born again as a new ego and returns, and the journey is a joyful festival in that it is full of the energy of love. The frequent appearance of ‘dance’ in the names of Moon Kyung Jung’s recent works indicates that her works themselves have a meaning as a festival.

What are particularly interesting in this exhibition are her drawings. They contain the colors and brush strokes of Korean paintings. Applying and washing out colors and drawing lines on paper in Korean paintings are similar by nature to attaching, detaching and moving in Western collages. Moon Kyung Jung’s drawings are stepping stones that bridge between Korean paintings and Western ones in the dimension of technique and, at the same time, are tracks showing that her exploration for ego is consistent. Her ‘flowing freedom,’ which may look wild at a glance, is expressing the life force of the artist who sets out a journey in search of her identity. Thus, it is natural that this festival of formative language, which may be called ‘A dance of existence,’ invites us heartily to taste joy.

Jung Moon-Kyung: Journey to the Unknown

Observed from her recent exhibition, “Tear Yourself Away”.

2008, 9, 19

Kang Gu-Won(Artist, Virgil Weekly)

For a while, Artist Jung Moon-Kyung has created her work through a circular process of painting and washing out. This method is done through letting the procedural process and the resulting piece to be brought forth solely by her free-will. However, without rigorously analyzing and understanding the space of canvas this is impossible. And it is through this rigorous understanding that her paintings are given off as extemporaneous, natural, and, at the same time, very sensitive. Therefore, this ‘free-will’ should not simply transpire out of an indiscriminate naiveté, rather, it should emerge from a solidified vista of understanding, self control and discipline for a true free-will is rightly freed only when restricted under these rigorous circumstances.

Recently, the artist has often been using the collage technique with not only paper, thread, and strings, but also with any kind of material she can find in her daily life. While her works may suggest a strict structuring, calculated composition, or organized partitioning of forms, one would recognize instead, a more casual, unresting flow in the piece and see that each and every piece of material in the ‘canvas’ is propagating itself into one another intersecting and uniting with the others that are in its enveloping neighborhood producing their own chords and chimes, and orchestrating different harmonies in different fields of the ‘canvas’. This sort of ramification is actually a product created from a reflection on the artist’s own life experience as washing out was a process developed by the artist as a means of escape from the conflicting cultural discourses that were present while she was in America. But now, she has turned what was sought to be a means of escape into a passionate pursuit of an apologetic integration and forgiving reconciliation such as the harmonies in the canvas. Because of this, the façade of her work comes out as considerably passionate, confident, and immediate. This is readily seen in her works, “A Desired Diversion” and “Mission Part.” While her unconventional use of the edges, sides and the back of the canvas in these two pieces signifies the artist’s impressive capacity to move in and out of the traditional understanding of space, all these washing, gluing, removing, and drawing her wide gamut of creative maneuvers with the materials—implies that she has already clearly understood that all these possible maneuvers are composed of in one single realm.

In case of, “Journey to the unknown: energy” and “Journey to the unknown: Space”, by expressing through only black and white, the artist has augmented the cohesiveness and the spreading of the artist’s speculation. These two paintings discharge the notion of the artist’s fundamental questioning of the purpose of her existence as solitude that boldly left her own niche and jumped into a foreign land. As a result, pockets of nostalgia seep out from these two paintings that are turned into refined and elegant vibrations. The subtly discrete surfacing of the burlap in the black background is interpreted as the ash of her previous self and the artist’s boldness to pull up that kind of silenced past and paint the nadir of her life in order to understand herself shows the remarkable depth of the artist’s audacious mindset. “Sue and Tom” and “Belong to Yourself” represent the process of washing out and adding (gluing), therefore, symbolizes the artist’s life by using dots, lines, planes, colors and letters. Her works such as, “White Light” and “Symphony In Red”, are seen as an attempt to blow liveliness, passion, and hope into us, the people who are emotionally diluted, sucked up of hope, and washed with terror from the tall, thunderous wave of the days of progressive technology and information. And this booming liveliness seems to have originated from what the artist has wrote in her note as, the Journey to the Unknown.

The Scenery Containing

Meditation and Redemption of Life

Cho, Song-shik (Oriental aesthetics)

There is a saying “Renewing something day by day is great virtue.” In the Book of Changes (I-Ching), we say it is beautiful when one changes oneself all the way into the new. Especially for an artist, such changes seem even sublime, and the works of art produced in this process lead us to state of happiness. It doesn‘s mean a superficial valuation of works as good or not, but the power of life an artist constantly shows through works.

To an artist, essential energy consists of continuation and changes. In terms of an Oriental concept of art, it means law and change at the same time as well as universality and individuality in contemporary art. It creates relationships between past and present, the world and oneself, inside and outside. The theme of the artist involving these two elements is ‘road.’ The road has three meanings: a religious meaning such as ‘road of a seeker of truth;’ a journey of life on the ‘road of life;’ and natural scenery uphill path. In this way her works are made up of these three elements and are always focused on natural scenery.

The works vary only according to what color she uses by putting two different elements on the basic natural scenery. At the first solo exhibition, the road of nature was compared to a journey of life. What she tried to show was, most of all, the trace of work process.

As it were, her works are “the process itself forming the uncertain road of life through the repeated action of erasing a great number of brush touches, leaving the trace of road on the empty ground, drawing something and again removing it (99 SEAF artists note).”

The off-crossed journey of life was represented with the repetition of various actions, and the results came to be her works. The repeated lines by brushing touches took the form and shape of nature. However, since the actions of the artist came from what she had concretely experienced in the past, the expressions corresponding to it were emotional and irregular.

At this exhibition, all actions are condensed to one. That is life itself. Here she poses a question of redemption and meditation on life. ‘Meditation’ is represented in large series works, while redemption' is shown individually in many small-sized works or series works. At first glance they look different, but they all indicate her existence and conflicts in the present. They can be classified into two by color tones one is ‘black pictures’ and the other is ‘light pictures.’

Black pictures imply the depth of life and meditation, not something nihilistic or pessimistic, and generate a kind of subtle aura (Lao-tzu). At the previous exhibition, the road of life was somewhat ambiguous and split, but now it is turned to the border of nature. The artist‘s self-reflection on life is represented as the border of nature. In her recent works we can find depth and emotion. The usual things that we meet easily around us appear as towns, roads, hills, or mountains. These are usual matters, but for that reason they are meaningful. They cannot be ignored because of their universality, for these elements play a role of strongly binding the past impression that the artist got through the lapse of time.

Here we can also find her efforts to unify the universality of natural matters and the artist‘s subjectivity. The artist draws the minimum form of nature by simplifying, transforming, and magnifying the object of nature, while she tries to throw a notion of the road of the artist‘s life on nature. That‘s why she sometimes uses a gunny bag to symbolize both the earth and life as an object with an organic form and yellow straight lines, which help turn the road of life into the border of nature. Life is made up of numerous experiences that accompany emotion. Therefore life has signs indicating numerous emotions. Emotion is at first concrete and individual but the mood of accumulated emotion in life is universal and philosophical. As a result, the artist has a strong love of traditional use of ink, for she thinks it is the only medium to express the mood of life. She pours accumulated and numerous personal emotions with the lapse of time on composition by repeatedly brushing red ink which is said to contain five colors, so to speak. These are actually not individual colors, but elements of a single color. As the emotion repeats itself more and more, it becomes richer and deeper. It is gradually sublimated as a sign of general life beyond personal or individual emotion. The artist seems to be sure that traditional mountain and river paintings have new changes of the very plastic traits.

'Light pictures' indicate another existence of the artist the theme of which is religious redemption and conversion. However, it is different from the meditation on life represented in black pictures.' How could the different elements, meditation and redemption, be consistent to an artist? It perhaps comes from the Oriental balance of emotional life and personal religion. These works have been put on exhibition since 99 SEAF, she says I take as a theme my road hanging around toward absolute value. (99 SEAF artist‘s note). That exhibition showed several small works and I couldn‘s find out how meaningful it was.

At this exhibition, as the previously mentioned ‘black pictures’ are put together the meaning becomes more clear. The artist says these works make her psychologically comfortable because they are connected with religious faith. The works are as a whole emphasized on composition of geometric forms with gunny bags and Korean paper Hanji.

This is an aesthetic expression of a silent God having no actual tension, and bright atmosphere symbolizes the light of Christianity. Light-colored ink touches are so soft that they give human emotion to the composition, and mixed mediums, especially pencil, charcoal, and ink are used to draw lines or dapples in the works. She makes the best use of these mediums to symbolize her own road of life subconsciously formed. In other words, it could be said that she on the whole represents her comfort received from God.

However, when these works are displayed side by side according to the time they are made, interesting changes are created. These drawing works are at first found lack of absolute plastic traits, but gradually strong lines and bold technique are used on the composition. She seems to come to have the confidence to plastically draw pictures. It is thought that such confidence comes from the process to seek her own identity through meditation on life and from the development of ‘black pictures.’

The artist herself says she began to seek for her identity in preparing for this exhibition. She says this with confidence about future works. The reason I mentioned in the beginning “great virtue” (I-Ching) is that I saw her true works that continuously made new changes.

One thing that I hope is the severity of ‘black pictures’ and psychological comfort will be put together, and developed to the whole sublimation.

Life … Cultivating through the Process of Removal

― Towards “Roads Exhibition” by Jung Moon-Kyung ―

Kim Young-Ho

Art Critic / Professor at ChungAng University

The key technigue used in Jung Moon-Kyung’s recent works is to deliberately erase by deluting parts of the reiterated colors from the composition. She does such work right after the colors (Chae Mook; Korea’s traditional technique) dry up.

She often adds several uneven lines and makes repetitive color drippings, which draws energy from the empty space of the background.

The shapes implicitly placed, as a rule, have no perceivable outlines but contain the stained colors produced by repetitive brushing touches.

The color effect naturally created as it dries up helps suggest the track of time of the composition.

Jung Moon-Kyung’s erasing method gives an important meaning to the process of making works as well as to produced works themselves; the process of positive removal and temperate drawings provides a special symbolism for the artist.

The artist exerts herself to plow a field placed in her inner mind as which she recognizes a canvas.

From this point of view, erasing work is one method of identifying her existence living in this world and can at the same time be said to the philosophical meditation about human beings running between creation and extinction.

The reason that her compositions contain the footprints of meditaion and implied poetic feeling lies in there although the immaturity of trimming still remains in her works.

The artist takes pains investing much more time and effort to the process than are needed in finishing a piece of work. She is forced to do so.

Because the process of making work is, as for her, no less important than a finish work.

After all, Jung Moon-Kyung visualizes the concept of process that she suggests through the object of roads.

Road means not a destined place but a process itself to lead somewhere.

It thus symbolizes the journey of life in the spot of living and is compared to spiritual discipline for the sake of absolute worth.

In this respect, Jung Moon-Kyung’s works are concerned with the world of religion based on practice with no purpose beyond knowledge and desire. But the role of artist is to seek for intrinsic nature by artistic expression, not by religious practice.

In Jung Moon- Kyung’s works, the process of removal and the representation of roads eventually has propriety in the frame of the composition.

There are no real figures of roads, which are merely expressed as some implicit lines and color fields.

It is therefore not advisable to try to find out the real forms of roads in her works.

Whereas the drawing lines and volum of restricted colors by reiterated brushings are sometimes seen as parts of natural landscapes.

Her paintings reveal the world of complicated recognition and synthetic, intuitional world that is encountered in the voyage of life apart from individual forms of images.

Despite the exclusion of outer image depiction of objects or literary description, the artist’s abstract images have the emphasis of reality about nature with the pealing generated by intuition.

On the other hand, it seems that the result of drawings on the ground plays more important role than the energy obtained by the removal work.

For example, the dripping marks of colors, lotus, tree roots and restrained forms that are associated with fruits have their respective expression and occupy the composition

These are considered as factors corresponding to the positive removal act that the artist tries on canvas.

The meaning of empty is, however, ironically not far from filling with other proper things.

It cannot be overlooked that Jung Moon-Kyung’s removal act is perceived as a variation for filling with something.

At this time when speed and noise, information and violence overflow like flood, Jung Moon-Kyung’s removal work is as fresh as the rain to wash out the smog that covers the whole city.

But the artist’s composition looks like a series of lyrical poems rather than narrative poems to represent the order of nature.

Her works imply the plain poetic feelings and deep rooted meditation led by the urban life.

Leaving behind the past memory that she tried to combine the idea of the different cultures through the life of studying in New York, the artist now holds in her bosom an abyss of a lonly lane found in nature.