Gallery ArtLink 2010
HIDDEN FLOWERS
CHANG Eungbok
The path to the summits winds upwards like a dragon,
On this high peak twin pines are standing tall.
Suddenly appearing, the whole world is so bright,
My first glimpse of Pongnae’s (ie Geumgang’s) ten thousand peaks.
At dawn, when the golden locks of the fairly gates are opened,
Autumn gathers the jade peaks in a bouquet of white peonies.
Who was it that came to this place and fell under its spell?
Who cut his hair and left the ordinary world? ‘
Sach’on Yi Pyongyon
In her new exhibition, Chang Eungbok, who is best known as a designer of textiles, furniture and interiors, has again broadened her scope, this time embarking on the construction of a series of works including pieces of furniture that nudge into the realm of sculpture and art installation, and a collection of hanbok clothing designs based on her own fabric patterns. These new works carry a subtle symbolism which at the same time does not overwhelm the pleasures to be gained from the sensual qualities of her designs. Carefully orchestrated to be harmoniously installed within the interior spaces of Art Link’s hanok architecture, these new works explore the fertile space that exists between the functional, the aesthetic and the symbolic.
The exhibition is called ‘Hidden Flowers’, and this invites several interpretations. Behind Chang’s simple exteriors lies sensual abundance - the unseen beauty of the women’s bodies beneath their hanbok, the mysteries lying within the subdued atmosphere of a room lined with tables, the secrets concealed within the cabinets’ austere exteriors, and the wild flowers that can be found amongst the Geumgang mountains depicted on her partitions.
In terms of context, Chang’s new direction can be understood as part of the contemporary artistic trend one recent exhibition in Japan has called Neo-Ornamentalism (1). This is a development within fine art seeking to reappraise the often derided qualities of the decorative in order to bring a fresh vitality and visual complexity to a creative field that can too readily seem dryly conceptual and minimal. East Asia is an appropriate cultural context for such a critical shift, for within its traditions the hierarchy established within Western culture between fine and applied art and has been much less clearly established. Chang, who increasingly sees herself as creatively occupying the territory between design and art, is happy to transgress the old boundaries, and challenges us to reassess her work within an art gallery more usually associated with the exhibiting of paintings and sculptures.
A special weaving of the past and present takes place in Chang’s work. Korea has changed almost beyond recognition within the space of just Chang’s own lifetime (she was born in 1961), not to speak of her parents’ generation, and in the rush towards prosperity many Koreans now feel little real bond with the land of their ancestors, often preferring to embrace Western culture rather than their own. Chang too has willingly absorbed such influences. However, over the course of her career this enthusiasm has become increasingly more nuanced and critical, so that today she can be said to remain delicately poised between East and West, refusing to succumb to excessive nostalgia for a lost Korea or to an easy ‘orientalism-for-export’ style mannerism that would make her more readily acceptable to Western taste. Instead, Chang remains focused on the goal of creating a truly contemporary Korean cultural idiom in the decorative arts. Through the appropriation of late Joseon period ( 16th– 19thcenturies) styles and imagery she evokes a period of Korean history that seems distant from contemporary experience, but which is also today, according to Chang, an essential reference point for the nation’s future.
While Chang is sensitive to the aesthetic and functional qualities of the imagery and materials she uses, recent work displays a new level of engagement with underlying East Asian philosophical and cultural symbolism, as well as with the desire to generate complex expressive moods. In choosing to draw on the paintings of Jeong Seon (1676-1759), for example, Chang is both paying homage to a quintessential Korean artist, and also evoking the Geumgang (Diamond) Mountain, a range of some 12,000 peaks located in the northern part of Gangwon-do province along the coast of the East Sea. Today, the mountains may seem even more dreamlike and distant from the ‘ordinary world’ of Jeong Seon’s friend, the poet Sach’on Yi Pyongyon, than ever, as they are now trapped within the borders of the authoritarian state from which Chang’s own father was forced to flee during the Korean War. But before the 1950’s Geumgang, famous throughout East Asia and often simply referred to as ‘Sea and Mountain’, was considered one of the most important travel destinations for those in search of the sublime and beautiful in nature. As a result many accounts exist in Korean poetry, prose and art attesting to its incomparable power to move the mind and senses. Jeong Seon, the father of the so-called ‘True-View’ landscape style in painting, painted them many times, and his work is the inspiration for the designs Chang uses for the partitions and panel-screens.
But while responding to the experience of nature as he saw it, Jeong Seon was also careful to underpin his paintings with a sophisticated conceptual framework based on the intertwining principles of Yin Yang. In the world-view of Taoism, Confucianism, and later of Seon, Ch’an (Chinese), Zen (Japanese)) Buddhism, everything is seen as coming into existence, developing, decaying, or going out of existence, and this state of radical impermanence means that all things are understood to realize both themselves and their relationship with other things within the unity of ch’i– the vital breath composed of the non-dualistic intertwining of Yin and Yang. Everything is an open to the invisible breath or flow of life, and everything is radically impermanent. In Korean art this awareness has always been central. In Jeong Seon’s paintings, for example, mountains are understood to be yang, while water is yin, and the artist carefully balanced these elements within his compositions.
Through the ambiguous juxtaposition of various contrasts, Chang in her new works also seeks to capture this spirit of Yin Yang, and a careful examination of imagery and symbols within the cabinets, partitions, tables, hanbok and textile designs will reveal a complex interweaving of these forces. A key recurring image in Chang’s new exhibition is the full moon, for example, which is yin (while the sun is yang). In Chang’s small moon-door sculpture and the large cabinet featuring an interior moon-like aperture, the moon becomes a symbol of longing and the desire for transcendence. The moon waxes and wanes, while the sun is constant, and East Asian culture gives both their place within the cosmic picture. As a consequence the full moon features in countless Korean poems and paintings, and it was once commonplace in Korea in construct pavilions just in order to view the full moon.
A room of illuminated rice-paper tables with geometric designs on their surfaces drawn from the patterns typical of Joseon era screens and doors continues the nocturnal theme, creating a moody world of shadows, of yin spirit. We may be put in mind of the Japanese writer, Junichiro Tanisaki celebrated book ‘In Praise of Shadows’ (1933), in which the author lamented what he saw as the excessive enlightenment of Japan caused by electrification, a phenomenon he linked to a far more deep-rooted malaise originating in the too ready capitulation of East Asian culture to Western technology and ideas of rationalism and pragmatism. Tanisaki yearned for the more ambiguous and nuanced world of candles, oil lamps, and rice-paper partitions and screens. But while Chang’s work is also suffused with a similar gentle nostalgia for time-passed, perhaps her shadowy world is not so much harking back to another time as it is wishing to find a modern-day equivalent, a new space in which we can experience a softer, kinder, slower and calmer world.
Much of Chang’s new work also seems to move between opposing but linked conditions of revelation (yang) and concealment (yin). In the case of her cabinets, for example, depending on where you are and whether the doors are closed or not, you will either be confronted by minimal, cool off-white rice-papered surfaces or richly designed and luminous interiors. Chang talks about how it was often the case that the austere exteriors of Joseon furniture designs belied the warmth lying within, and how this was a reflection of the restrictions placed on such designs by the strict and austere codes of Neo-Confucian society. Similarly, her partitions change in aspect, both hiding and revealing their surfaces as you walk past them, on how closely you look, and depending from which side they are viewed.
This interest in creating a play between the visible and invisible is also motivated by Chang’s wish to generate a feeling of expectation and desire, a sense of things hoped for but perhaps never gained, of persons desired but never won, or of dreams thwarted by an indifferent reality. Linked to this is the strong feeling of absence that is conveyed by Chang’s work, which can be interpreted as a melancholy expression of solitude and loss, and much of her work is suffused with a delicate and bittersweet feeling for the transience of happiness, which is often also the central mood of traditional Korean music and poetry. The new works seem to transport us into a secret nocturnal world of moonlight, or to set us adrift in a vast ocean or high up amongst the thousand peaks of Geumgang mountain.
Chang’s choice of rice paper as the dominant material of choice in the exhibitions brings a certain austerity to her new work. She uses ‘sunji’ (pure 100% yarn rice paper) because it ‘breathes’, she says, permitting the circulation of light and air, as in traditional hanok houses with their rice paper doors, windows and walls. Chang also notes that during the Joseon period cabinets were made of rice paper in order that their contents, such as clothes, would be better protected.
But the apparent lack of visual complexity of some of her work can also be understood within the broader philosophical and spiritual context of the East Asian ideas concerning void or emptiness. In painting this was traditionally expressed not only through the depiction of the profound spaces of nature, such as clouds, atmosphere, and the ocean, but also by worlds that are abridged, suggested, and invisible. From the perspective of Western art, which tends to explain everything based on forms, the void of Asian painting may to a certain extent appear to suggest a lack of structure, or a space of incompletion. But in the theory of East Asian art void exists as a complete and legitimate part of a work, and in a more active sense is an ‘unpainted painting’. Hence, void does not mean the renunciation of the use of space but rather the encouragement of space, a kind of absent-presence or present-absence.
Furthermore, the apparent blankness of several of Chang’s works parallels the strong feeling in Korean art, architecture and design for the spirit of simplicity and imperfection, which can be understood as reflecting an awareness of these qualities within nature itself. This in its turn is an aesthetic that can be linked to the influence of Taoism and Seon Buddhism, which emphasise the overlooked, the insignificant, the humble, the crude and the apparently ugly.
A wholly new departure for Chang are her clothes designs of the traditional Korean female dress, the hanbok. Here, in the video that showcases these designs, we encounter a more luxurious and sensual mood that at the same time is also fused with a subtle melancholy. Chang has used her own textile designs and fabrics in order to bring a very contemporary twist to what is usually a rather conservative form. In the video we see Chang’s friends and colleagues of different ages patiently standing before a perfectly white background. They are very modern Korean women suddenly transformed into characters from what seems to be a kind of dream-Korea. Chang herself also poses, as if she were perhaps the wife of some Chosen-era yangban official, waiting anxiously for his return to safely after fighting one of Korea’s many enemies.
NOTES
1.’Neo-Ornamentalism’, Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo. 6 February – 11 April 2010.
Simon Morley Seoul. April 2010