Kim Tchah-sup’s Odyssey

 Kim Hong-hee

Former Director of Seoul Museum, Ssamzie Space, professor, Hongik University

1. Foreword

Kim Tchah-sup is an artist for our times and a noble spirit who, armed with a metaphysical world view, has walked a solitary path far from the tendencies of the Korean art world. His sixteen-year stay in the United States and his transcendent and critical character situate him on the periphery of the Korean art world, yet his original work has found a place in the history of Korean art. The Korean art world’s expression of sympathy for his profound art is based on historical consciousness and Korean identity, as well as respect for his determination to follow a single artistic path.

Kim’s has been a love-hate relationship with the Korean art world. After his graduation from Seoul National University in 1963 and before setting off for the United States in 1974, he participated on the one hand, in important international art exhibitions and took his place as a promising young artist. On the other hand, his solitary struggle against the art world resulted in his expulsion from the AG(Avant-Garde) art group of which, ironically, he was a founder. Even after he was settled in the United States, he remained independent, critical, and resolute. When he finally returned to Korea, he chose to live in the isolation of the Gangwon region, fa from Seoul and its art scene. Nevertheless, he maintained his contact with it through exhibitions and friendships with other artists.

When it came to his artistic style, he remained both close and distant. Before leaving Korea for America, he had followed the major Korean tendencies of the sixties and the seventies such as “1’art informel,”, minimalism, and conceptual art. During his stay in America, however, he maintained a certain distance with the Korean art world and began to create his own style, one that, after his experimentation with geometric etchings in the early days of his stay, became autobiographical and figurative, midway between expressionism and realism. This figurative style nourished the roots of a unique neo-expressionist painting that he would continue to develop after returning to Korea. Kim’s neo-expressionist painting could be associated with the Western neo-expressionism of the eighties, but also as a product of his artistic odyssey, beginning with his departure from Korea and his sojourn as a third-world artist in America. If we consider the end result, the neoexpressionist painting that he created outside Korea suggests a new type of “Minjung” or “People’s” art, which was dominant during the same period, and, by foreshadowing Korean postmodern art of the nineties, maintains an indirect relationship with the Korean art world. In the end, Kim stands as an art historical figure who has enriched and enlarged postmodern painting and Minjung realism with a unique autobiographical figuration and a neo-expressionist style that captured the spirit of the period.

In this essay I present his art historical exploit as a geopolitical world view based on a critical awareness of history and civilization, a resolute spirit, and constant self-reflection. I divide his artistic odyssey into two legs, from the end of the sixties to the end of the seventies, and from the eighties until the present. The first leg begins with his youthful experimentation in Korea and ends with his geometric abstraction in America, and reflects his Western-oriented modernist thinking. The second leg returns him to Korea. During this period, he creates an autobiographical and nationalistic neo-expressionist painting as if to manifest a “de-Westernized” postmodern consciousness. This change of direction from America to Korea signals a shift from modernism to postmodernism from geometric abstraction to expressionist figuration and form and Apollonian to a Dionysian sensibility. In this process of change, he establishes a neo-expressionist style that is distinct from Western neo-expressionism. Through a discussion of Kim’s artistic odyssey, I hope that his significant contribution to art history and its link to the Korean art world will be illuminated.

2. The First Leg: Heading to America

Kim’s artistic career began in the second half of the sixties, when Korea, faced with modernization and westernization, was in economic and political turmoil, and cultural upheaval. In the art world, this was reflected in the many tendencies, groups, and movements, all driven by different tastes and ideologies. Among them were Engagement (1961) and Actuel (1962), which practiced abstract expressionism; Origin (1964), which introduced op art; and Moo-dongin, Nonqol, and Shin (1967), which experimented with happenings and installation. In 1969, the AG group was formed “to create a new form with an avant-garde consciousness and to pull Korean art out of its poverty and insignificance.” After his expulsion from AG because of his dissenting opinions. Kim avoided group activities and developed himself to working alone.

During this period, the young artist experimented with a variety of media and styles to create pop art paintings, ready-mades, installations, realist figurative paintings, silkscreen prints… all of which revealed Western influences and were remarkable in determining the artist’ future. Although abstract, “self-Portrait” (1968), the first one in his portrait series, presents fragmented images in a compartmentalized horizontal structure, and opens the path to his future figurative self-portraits. “Green,” presented in a 1969 AG exhibition, is made of fabric, glass, and real grass. “Iron Age Ⅰ” (1969) is composed of four pipe wrenches, each clamping down on the mouth of the other to form a square structure. Both works express Kim’s taste for geometric composition, architectural structure, and new materials. “Perspective,” presented in 1970 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul, and “Situation-A,”(Fig.1) exhibited in 1971 at the Sao Paolo Biennial, are made of wooden triangles, squares, and rectangles, and are pioneering examples of his future triangular and geometric shapes. His 1973 silk-screen series “Situation, representing the statue of Buddha at Sukgool Temple(Fig.2), in Gyeongju, near Pusan; and the Chosun Dynasty (1392-1910) political martyr Jun Bong-joon: and the 1973 realist painting “The Moment of Action,”(Fig.3) depicting the suffering of Yoo Gwan-soon, a student resistance fighter against the Japanese occupant, show his interests in history and historical figures. In his series of “Situation”(Fig.4) silk-screen prints, exhibited at the Seventh Tokyo Print Biennial, in 1970, Kim introduces his field of stones, which will become his trademark.

International art exhibitions such as the Fifth Paris Biennial in 1967, the Seventh Tokyo Print Biennial in 1970, the Sao Paolo Biennial in 1971, and the Italian International Print Biennial in 1972, recognized the avant-garde, disciplined work of the young Kim and invited him to participate. Since these were the repressive years of Park Chung-hee’s “Yushin” (Renewal) campaign, it was a chance for an artist with a thirst for other cultures to be invited to foreign exhibitions. Invigorated by his participation in these biennials, Kim decided to study Western civilization in America, and in 1974 he left his country, determined to stay away for a long time. His patriotic idea to support the development of Korea by embracing Western rationalism, science, and technology made him a pioneer of modernization. With the aide of a Rockefeller Fellowship from 1974 to 1976, he went to Pratt Institute, in Brooklyn, where he majored in etching because it demands intellect more than sentiment, meticulous technique and craftsmanship more than feeling, and above all, scientific knowledge about water, fire, temperature, and time. He thought that etching would be an opportunity for himself and other Korean artists whom he saw as too sentimental to challenge themselves.

He took his first print subject - fields of harsh stone on banks of Lake Paldang, near Seoul - from photos he had taken before he left Korea, and created with them the aforementioned silk-screen “Situation” (1970). Of the grassless and waterless field of sun-dried stones, only the tough stones that refused to be moved or vanquished by the water current reside there. He represented the tenacious stones with acute angled etching as if in the image of his own radical thinking and determinism. In “New England Coast” (1975), he developed the theme into a geopolitical statement, and in the eighties, he used it in his oil painting. At the same moment, however, a triangle made its first appearance in the picture plane, causing the stone fields to recede into the background and loose some of their meaning. Its appearance was a logical pictorial development. The triangle, which had already appeared in the 1970 “Situation,” is not only a symbol of Western rationalism that is also implied in the print process itself, but a plastic and conceptual element that adds direction and vitality to the calm stone field.

Toward the end of the seventies, the triangle dominates the entire surface of the work and turns the field of stones into an abstraction, as in the works “Paradox” and “Triangle,” of 1976. It is at its most extreme when abbreviated into two lines crossing the etching as if to repeat the triangles’ titled line, as in “Two Lines” (1978). In “A Line” (1978), instead of stone fields, the artist inscribes an oblique line on an abstract black ground; and in “Between Infinites” (1976) and “Light and Shadow” (1979), the delicate lines form a thick horizontal band that enrich the aesthetics of etching. With his geometric prints of stone fields, triangle, and oblique lines, the artist attracted the attention of the American art world and reinforced his presence in America.

As a medium and with its geometric motifs, Kim’s prints of this period reflect an Appollonian intellect and a modernist sensibility. His modernism is not, however, petrified nor formalist, but dynamic, expressing determination, hope, and development. His is not an equilateral but a right triangle whose apex is, to quote the artist, “the culmination of energy, the starting point of movement, and the beginning of life.” Its is the point of growth of the triangle that invigorates the calm, dry stones. The dynamism of the “straight Line” series springs from the oblique line that crosses a field of stones or a linear band of fabric, as in “Moving Right Angle” (1979).

Kim’s interest in movement drove him to a new phase of opening up one side of the triangle. In the 1978 “Palm of the Hand,” the first of a series, the open right angle is connected to hand holding a pair of chopsticks. Chopsticks, hand, and open triangle are the three elements of his “Palm” series of etchings and oil paintings. In the 1978 oil painting “Creation,”(Fig.5) he juxtaposes a hand at work and an open right triangle, which suggests that creation is linked to openness, in-betweenness, and indeterminacy. The “Right Angle” series created from the end of the seventies to the beginning of the eighties ？ including the oil painting “Right Angle” in which the open triangle overlaps the knot in the center of the wood plank, “Right Angle” where the wooden triangle with a burned angle is affixed to the canvas, and a small object piece from which one part of a square wood plank is cut(Fig.6)―suggests that for it to develop, the apex of the triangle has to be open and breathe life. Another oil painting of an open triangle, “8Cm” (1978-81), proposes that eight centimeters is the ideal cup diameter for the hand, the maximum size of an object that a pair of chopsticks can grasp, and the average distance between human eyes. Into this eight-centimeter opening, Kim injects philosophical and aesthetic meaning. The open triangle, according to the artist, is a symbol of non-Wester, non-Euclidian geometry, a lacuna or mystery.

Kim confesses that “It took me two years to open the triangle, and I felt so relieved to do it.” For him, opening the triangle represents the painful identity crisis and wandering of Korean artists in the seventies. The open triangle answers the existential question “Who am I?” as a third-world artist in the center of the New York art world. It is a metaphor of the artist’s change from a Western sensibility to a “de-Westernized” consciousness, from a modern Apollo to a postmodern Dionysus. It announces and prepares the way for the second leg of his odyssey, which will carry him back to Korea.

3. The Second Leg: Returning To Korea

According to Kim, his life in America was “a continual effort to take hold of a piece of truth.” It was a period of waiting “mixed with blood and tears,” of endurance, reflection, and suffering. To overcome the cultural shock of his American beginnings, the disorientation of seeing without seeing and hearing without hearing, he studied natural science and geometry, and learned about rationalism through etching. In the eighties, he pondered the struggle for existence and the history of evolution, and visited the Museum of Natural History, in New York, to study biology and the human sciences. Like his opening of the triangle, he discovered the primal force of change and the life force in “the other side” of geometrical order, and, finally, he saw himself clearly.

What really inspired an essential change in him was his travels involving archeological research, during the eighties. Accompanied by his wife, the painter Kim Myong-hi, he visited New Mexico in 1980, and Spain, France Italy, and New England in 1983. Later, he went to the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico and Shandong Peninsula in China. He received a shock and awakening in front of the Great Wall and the Pyramids. He was inspired by reproductions of the Bermuda Triangle, Peruvian drawing, and the monumental volcanic head on Easter Island. His travels taught him the value of non-Western civilization and of his own origins. His encounter with Scythian civilization was a turning point; he became proud of Asia and the Korean culture. While visiting the well-known 1975 exhibition “Land of the Scythians,” at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, he noticed the resemblance between Scythian iron artifacts and artifacts excavated from the ancient Korean royal city of Gyeonju. It was while traveling across Eurasia, however, that he made his greatest discovery: his identification with the Scythians. Now he could place the Korean peninsula inside world history and, because he had met his forebears, regain his pride at being Korea.

Inspired by this voyage of self-discovery, Kim began to paint neo-expressionist figurative painting, including a series of self-portraits that contain dialogues with himself. The meaning of Western neo-expressionism, including its unappealing international popularity, had come to him while traveling in Italy and standing in front of the Berlin Wall. His work showed common traits with its Western counterpart; not only did it create fragmentary and symbolic hybrid images by revealing a subconscious subjugated to form and transformed into image, but it used the traditional medium of oil painting, albeit in an innovative way. Moreover, his subjective consciousness guaranteed his and the Korean people’s identity. As a result of a liberating odyssey in search of personal and collective archetypes, his artistic world expressed doubts about Western modernism and rationalism.

In the eighties, Kim painted sorrowful and sinister self-portraits with a skull, a tomb, and a burial mound, using expressionistic brush strokes and heavy, colorful impasto. Beginning with his 1981 “Dialogue With My Own Shadow,” in which a fragment of a Goya painting casts its shadow over a field of stones, his portrait series began to have a white skull in reference to both a childhood experience and the rectitude of the Korean people. It is both an autobiographical image of the psyche as a source of artistic energy, and an image of collective unconsciousness in which cultural myth and personal history become one. An example is the 1983 triptych “The Green (Self Portrait.”(Fig.7) The left panel shows the artist in a traditional vest and blue jeans holding a skull; the right panel is a rough rendering of Masaccio’s “Adam and Eve Expelled From Paradise”; the middle panel is the color green. Another example is the 1984 “Bridge,” where he paints himself lying down and holding a skull on what is supposedly the thirty-eighth parallel. In “Cold” (1985)(Fig.8), the artist is represented by the skull alone. Like the skull, Kim gives a deep personal and collective psychological meaning to the burial mound, which is from a childhood memory of an earth wounded by bombardments during the Korean War. The burial mound also reveals a layer of civilization and history, the process of building houses on tombs and making tombs again on the collapsed building. Like lumps of concentrated historical time, the snow covered “Mound” (1983) and “Horse Tomb” (1984)(Fig.9) are Kim’s efforts to reach the soul of his ancestors.

He also uses an antique image of a boy as a metaphor for his childhood memory. In his portrait series painted on maps, such as “A Boy” (1987) standing against a wall painting of old tombs, the pretty “Ganymede” (1987), and “The Um,”(Fig.10) where a boy in a school uniform holds an um in the crook of his arm, the artist recontextualizes himself historically and geographically. The same hold true for “Weeping Boy” (1987), a motif borrowed from a painting by the well-known genre painter Kim Hong-do (1745-?). The artist adds a rusty sword with a dragonlike handle from the period of the Three Kingdoms (47 B.C.-688 A.D.) to the boy’s hand, and in the background he paints himself as a second lieutenant, a juxtaposition that links the artist to history and art tradition.

Another series of self-portraits appeared in the late eighties. These include “Self-Portrait” (1987) with scarf and clenched fists, “Self-Portrait” (1988) with a brush(Fig.11), “Pain-ter” (1988-09), or the pain of the artist, painted on a map, “Self-Portrait ？ Northwest Wind” (1988), painted on a paper cup pasted on a canvas, and “Third Nature” (1989), a nude bust. Whereas the previous series of self-portraits with skull, burial mound, or young boy is metaphorical, this series is realistic. Despite its traditional Korean motifs, the former series, with its expressive brushstrokes and semiabstract images, brings us closer to Western neo-expressionism. Its portraits are realistic, yet they transcend realism’s limits. It is Kim’s typical free style that negates Minjung art’s schematic, fixed forms. Toward the end of the eighties and into the nineties, his figurative neo-expressionism painting establishes an iconography between expressionism and realism.

Among his nude busts of himself, “Cosmic Eyes” (1988) is remarkable for the stars covering the artist’s eyes and body. If the metaphorical self-portraits with skulls link him to the past, and the realistic simile like self-portraits represent the present, “Cosmic Eyes,” which is realistic and metaphorical at the same time, speaks to the future of the artist. The stars allude to a future full of hope and absolute solitude. The artist transforms himself into a metaphorical body that is immaterial, cosmic, and transrealistic. “Cosmic Eyes” fuses simile and metaphor, realism and expressionism. The self-portraits contain hope, suffering, sorrow, and a heroic determination to find roots and transcend Western rationalism through voyage into the past and adventure into the future. As such, they distance themselves from narcissism and self-indulgence.

The “Coffee Cup” series, which Kim created intensively from 1985 to 1988, can be seen as a continuation of the self-portraits of the eighties. He reconstructs reality with a deconstructive gesture by taking apart paper coffee cups ？ a symbol of American popular culture ？ and then painting autobiographical images such as skull and burial mound on them, while painting over the classical Greek images of the Discobolus and the Temple at Delphi printed on the cups. Just as the field of stones, the triangle, and the open triangle of the seventies reflect his philosophical and conceptual side, the self-portraits of the eighties and their miniature version, the coffee cups series, manifest his will to criticize civilization and seize reality.

As a result of the pursuit of his and his country’s roots in his series of self-portraits, in 1990 Kim decided to put an end to his life as a “cultural hostage” in America, and to return to Korea. When he looked at the map of the world, his artistic intuition, like a shamanistic premonition, told him that the tide was turning from the West to the East, and reflecting on his and Korea’s place in the world, he set off again, continuing his odyssey toward Korea. The eighties were a period of wandering, suffering, and identity crisis; the nineties will be his successful return, his comfortable settlement in the Gangwon region, and his psychological tranquility. Now, based on his well-being and stable lifestyle, he opened a new window onto direction and place according to the geopolitical view that history should be considered from the point where on stands.

From a geopolitical perspective, he retraced the footprints of migrating Korean people. After the Ice Age, the earth became green again, and a nomadic people set out toward the southeast in search of grazing lands. The south with its temperate climate implies sunlight, hope, and civilization. Considering climate as a key to the birth or death of civilization, Kim finds hope in the Korean peninsula, one of the mildest regions in the world. For him, the Korean peninsula is not just his homeland but a ground for mankind. It is the center of the East Asian temperate climate where our ancestors settled and the center of the world as a utopia where the sun shines from the mild south and where man instinctively seeks the east. Here is where the northern birch, the southern bamboo, and the pine between them can grow and open to an east that symbolizes hope and vitality. When Kim opens a right angle of one of his triangles and directs it toward to light, he expresses the geopolitical hope in the Korean peninsula.

It is the reality of the North-South division that inspired his obsession with the direction south. To the artist who looks at the political reality of a divided country from meteorological and geopolitical standpoint linked to climate, geography, and the nature of a Gangwon region that traverses the thirty-eight paralle, comes the realization that this area has a special historical meaning. This is why, after his return to Korea in 1990, instead of living in Seoul, he chose the semi-isolation of Gangwon. This will be his source, where he will seek a living art: “For the artist and the soldier, place comes first.”

The tree and map that often appears in Kim’s work of the nineties reflect his geopolitical views on place, direction, and light, especially the light of the south. His tree series begins with “Pine Tree,” which in painted on a map, then follows with the themes of a birch, lace-bark pine, and a bamboo plant painted on view camera film holders. He is especially fond of painting the birch during the spring thaw, its slender trunk still showing a white line of snow on it as it leans northward, in works such as “Thawing” (1996, 1998), in which a branch describes a white line, “Thawing” (1999), in which the same motif is set off by an abstract composition, and “Birch Seeds” (1999), drawn with a pencil and composed of a real birch seed and leaf. With its red branches and white trunk, the birch struck the artist deeply enough during his 1997 travels in Siberia in search of ethnic Koreans so that he used the tree as a ymbol for direction. The 1996-97 “Birch, Lace-Bark Pine, Bamboo” painted on film holders is a triptych whose right-hand and left-hand panels represent the northern birch and the southern bamboo, and whose center panel represent the lace-bark pine as a camouflage motif suggesting a mild climate’s frontier region. Because the spotted trunk of the mature lace-bark pine looks like a camouflage patter, Kim uses it as a symbol for the border of the middle region of Korea and the danger of war on the peninsula. The work places a geopolitical interpretation on three trees that grow in different climates and also around his studio in Naepyung-lee.

Like the tree, the map reveals the artist’s strong attachment to the south as the ideal direction. In his studio-home, which was once used as a temporary school if ever the local school got flooded, he paints on paper while facing south toward the sunshine, while imagining the school children warming themselves in the sun around the eastern windows. In this way, the top of the paper becomes the south where the sun shines, for the top is south when seen from a moving direction. For the Korean people, who are the descendants of the Scythians descending from the north, the south must be on top. The compass, invented by the Chinese, also places the south at the top, as indicated in a map of the Tang Dynasty. ”Namdaemun” (“South Gate”). In Seoul, is also in the south when the king looks out at it from Gyeonbok Palace. Of course, today’s European maps place the south at the bottom. Kim feels that we have lost our sense of direction to the conquests of Westerners and insists that we reverse and correct the direction of European maps. By reversing the map, he presents an unexpected and original idea with which to regain what we have lost.

Even though a map is one of the most precise of human creations, by subverting the Western point of view, the artist adds a touch of the Korea people and of himself and erases Western civilization. By inverting it, he says that East Asia is the beginning of history and that tis equestrian nomadic people are the beginning of history and the center of the world. The inverted map is a healing and decentralizing artistic corrective to a world that places the center of civilization around the West, and a rediscovery of the gaze of the Scythian horsemen who looked toward the south as they crossed Siberia and Mongolia.

Kim had already used a amp in 1984 to describe his situation in the world. Beginning with “You Are Not the Enemy,” at the end of the eighties he painted self-portraits on maps. In the center of this one, over the Pacific Ocean and the Americas he pastes a piece of cardboard on which he draws Korea with gouache and magic marker. Beginning in 1993, instead of using a map as a ready-made canvas, in works such as “Game” and “Perspective,” he begins to create painted maps using view camera film holders as supports to suggest an East Asia seen through the symbolic lens of a camera as an extension of the eyes. During this period he begins to draw upside-down maps. In “Right Direction” (1997), he paints a modern globe on an old, upside-down map. In “Northeast Asia” (1999)(Fig.13) he inverts Asia. In “Right Direction” (1999), as if denying the evidence and precision of cartography, he focused on a map of Korea, juxtaposing an upside-down map and reversing a map from left to right around the many-layered maps in the center, in order to demonstrate the seasonal changes occurring according to the axis of the globe at the thirty-eighth parallel.

Map, tree, and self-portrait will be Kim’s most frequent subjects throughout the nineties. However, the self-portraits will no longer have the sinister skulls of the eighties nor the aspect of a boy, but, instead, will deck him out as a gentleman wearing Western garb. Their scale will also become smaller, even to the point of becoming miniature, as in the painting so film holders and mini blackboards. This is the case in “Vision” (1999), where the artist, in a Western suit, is standing on the thirty-eighth parallel with his back to us and his hands behind his back, a pose that seems to make him reflect on the situation of the self on a divided Korean peninsula. “Self-Portrait with Meteorite” (1997)(Fig.14) present him wearing a dark blue suit, a white shirt, and a tie, holding in his right hand a meteorite. Them meteorite, which he bought the same year for $2850, was found in the Nambian desert. In the painting, he is proud to have this 100% iron meteorite, for it shows his respect for the Iron Age. The cup that a disembodied right hand holds out to him has its visual precedent in “The Cup Ⅲ” (1993)(Fig.15), as well as in “The Cup Ⅱ” (1994), in which he makes a reference to the Goryo Dynasty (918-1392) Kings who poured alcohol into the cup of a cavalry general before sending him into battle. Kim’s cups fit into the hand perfectly, and like his open right triangles, they are an aesthetic and philosophical metaphor for his past. The hand that holds out the cup is like his alter ego. In the 1995 “Self-Portrait,” a hand springs from a corner of the canvas; and in “Uneasiness (Two Lines)”(Fig.16) of the same year, he replaces the self-portrait with two hands; one hold two overlapping lines, on straight, the other snaking ？ suggesting the thirty-eighth parallel ？ while the other holds a cup. In “Self-Portrait” with birch whip, (2000), the artist, dressed in a suit, steadies himself with his left hand on the trunk of a birch, while his right hand holds a thin birch branch. In “Baton” (2000), a floating arm on a sky-blue background holds in its hand another birch branch; and in ‘Stance,”(Fig.17) also from that year, a miniature of “Self-Portrait” with birch whip is painted on a map background. In his portrait series of the nineties, he represents himself as a ritualized image, well dressed and holding a wine cup or baton as if to congratulate himself for having rediscovered his roots after a long period of painful wandering. Like the self-portraits of the eighties, the self-portraits of the nineties fuse realism and expressionism, metaphor and simile into one entity. Nevertheless, they are denser, as if to compensate for their smaller scale.

4. Conclusion

“My work is a painting journal that documents the present.” Kim Tchah-sup believes that creation is not a superficial wrapping if it is grounded in the here and now. His view that the artist should penetrate reality and that art should be related to life suggests the realism of Courbet, whose concrete paintings are composed of real things and based on real facts. It is also like Minjung realism, which proclaims that reality is consciousness and that art should communicate with life. However, unlike them, rather than denouncing social injustice or being a political organ, his realism is a conscientious criticism of history that puts himself in a historical and geopolitical context.

His concerns range from the inception and mutation of history and civilization to the origins of the universe and life, from the identities of people, self, race, and gender to the powerful relationship between discourse and subject. He understands the effects and strategies of power that imbue history, discourse, ideology, system, knowledge, and the great mistakes of a Western civilization grounded in rationalism. Foucault, in this analyses of genealogical and archeological methodology, suggests that the artist subjectivizes the political effects and alienation of the discourse imminent in our daily experiences and describes truth and reality with the aide of practical knowledge based on historical events. Unlike Minjung art and social realism, Kim’s painting is discursive and textual, to be read rather that to be seen, as well as metaphor, allegory, and symbol. It transforms vision into language, iconic image into textual figuration. If we were to categorize his painting, it would be postmodern or neo-expressionist.

Kim’s figurative paintings fit into the neo-expressionist movement that dominated the Western art world at the same period. However, Kim’s neo-expressionism, different from German, Italian, and American neo-expressionism, can only be called Korean, because it is based on his experience of the contradictions and confusions of his double identity as a third-world artist living in America. Through his travels, especially his encounter with Scythian civilization, he has come to identify with the Eurasian nomads, and learned deconstructive theories of poststructuralism, postmodernism, third-world theory, and postcolonialism. His realization that “I am a descendent of the Scythians” has motivated and provided him with contextual and subjective material for his neo-expressionist works.

Stylistically, his work differs from Western neo-expressionism. He has developed his own style, creatively combining realism and expressionism, metaphor and simile. Creating small-format works and employing a dense aesthetic, he has differentiated himself from Western neo-expressionists whose works are maximalist in scale and expression. With the exception of a few large-format works, his paintings are on a human scale. Like the cup whose size is neither too large nor too small to fit into the hand, Kim prefers moderate scale, and, instead of reaching for the sublime, his aesthetics are of noble moderation. His miniature, reductivist paintings on deconstructed coffee cups and view camera film holders demand a spectator’s voyeuristic gaze, at opposite ends with the experience of the gigantic. Does he not say to us that we should cast a critical gaze on a world that is upside-down? With a style that fits its subject and content, Kim has created a painting that is his own as well as very Korean. Instead of Western rationalism, Kim has and the historical awareness to create an original neo-expressionist work whose themes are Asianism and the south, a spirit of resistance, a correction that inverts the world to recover his lost identity, and plastic experimentation. This is the context for an appreciation of Kim Tchah-sup’s historical legitimacy and contribution to the history of art.

Notes

1) According to Kim, in 1968, five artists, including Kim Koo-rim and himself, met at the Aris Caf？, in a small street behind the Chosun Daily News, and formed a group that Kim Tchah-sup suggested be called “AG.” They established the rule that candidates had to meet with the approval of all the members, and that anyone could leave the group at anytime. With the arrival of new members to the group, disagreement ensued, and Kim was expelled in 1970.

2)The MoMa purchased his etching for its collection in 1975, and in 1977 it invited him to participate in the exhibition “Acquisitions ’73-’76.” When he graduated from Pratt Institute in 1976, he received the John Taylor Arms Award at the “34th Audubon Artist Annual Exhibition,” and in 1977, Pratt rewarded him by buying one of his etching at the exhibition “30 years of American Printmaking,” at the Brooklyn Museum. Poster McCray of the Rockefeller Foundation praised him work as “etching of the highest creativity for the eyes of man.”

3) At the age of four, Kim and his family moved from Yamaguchi, Japan, where he was born, to Gyeongju, Korea, his father’s birth place. In Japan, his father had been an engineer who worked on the construction of airplane hangars. (Kim seems to have inherited his talent for etching and craftsmanship from his father.) His first name in Japan was Yuzo. In Korea, his name became Tchah-sup when he entered elementary school. He did not adjust to school life, which made him feel “extremely isolated.” He saw many soldiers of the “Skulls” (“Baikgol”) Regiment during their military exercises in his school yard, and sometimes even executions by firing squad. All of this made him think about the meaning of life. He also walked among the ancient burial mounds that bomb explosions had opened up and discovered archeological artifacts such as roof tile and pottery fragments, which made him feel attached to his cultural heritage. During one of his walks alongside a mountain slope, he came upon the cover of a ceramic urn from the Shilla Dynasty (57 B.C.-935 A.D.). Uncovering the um, he saw inside it a skeleton. This childhood memory is the source of the skulls and burial mounds in his works and seems to program his encounter with Scythian civilization.

4)The artist adds that the “horse” - “mal,” in Korean - of “Horse Tomb” also designates “language” - also “mal,” in Korean. He likes to paint horses that love to be near water. For the artist, ancestral tombs express lost civilization and its language. 

5) In “Glimpses of World History” (1930-33), a selection of 196 letters exchanged with his daughter Indira Gandhi when he was imprisoned, Nehru sums up history with the sentence “In a upside-down world, it’s O.K. to begin reading from the end.” Seventy years later, Kim expressed a “de-Westernized” historical consciousness with his remarkable upside-down maps.

6) Although he began to present his map paintings in 1993, already at the end of the eighties, right before his return to Korea, he was painting them in his Soho studio. This was a period of political confrontation between the two Koreas, and to avoid misunderstandings, he chose not to show them. One day, the Columbia University and Sarah Lawrence University professor Philip Gould visited his studio. On noticing the painting of an ancient cavalry general’s cup painted on a map of Asia, he asked him why he painted upside-down maps of Asia. “It makes me feel comfortable,” Kim replied.

7) Kim claims that for a civilization to develop it has to master iron work. The Scythians were the first to discover iron in the southern Urals. The purest iron comes from meteorites, which is three times heavier than ordinary iron. It is said that the Japanese Nippondo sward were partially wrought from the iron of meteorites.

Kim Tchah-sup’s Odyssey Published by the Korean Culture & Arts Foundation, 2002