Kwak Namsin

[Vanitas and Laugh of a Patient of Aesthetic Hysteria]

Kim Wonbang (Critic, Artist)

The relationship between artwork and artist is a mutually reflective one. That is to say that the two function as a mirror for each other. Artist who begins his work, thinking that it is an imago that reflects his innermost thoughts, will soon confront himself in the most unfamiliar way, subverting the stereotype he once had about himself. The process of artistic creation includes a micro level of destruction and revolutionary events in which new artwork breaks both the stereotypes from the past and the conventional framework and discovers a new self. It is precisely these events that serve as motivation and happiness that sustain the artistic process. To explicate this process with a recent popular concept in psychoanalysis, the process is similar to the life of a hysterical subject (a person whose desire is repressed). On the one hand, a hysterical subject is one whose true desires are repressed due to the dominant value system or ethics, leading to a psychopathological disorder. On the other hand, their psychopathological problems lead them to deeper introspection and eventually to a truer self.

Installation view of ‘Who is this’ at GalleryMEME

We find clear trajectories of the desires and small-scale revolutions of a hysterical subject in Kwak Namsin’s early works (and their social contexts) in the 70s and the 80s. He began his career with Shadow Series, works that featured subtle pencil drawings of shadows. As Kwak himself articulated, the series was a meaningful effort to transgress the framework of the modernist abstract or Korean monochrome (in strictly critical terms, it is more apt to call it monotone abstract painting) that dominated the art scene of the 70s. While it is true that his Shadow Series contained elements of a monotone abstract painting, the fact that the shadows retained a concrete figure suggests that there was a strong ‘desire for figure and meaning’. We confirm such an interpretation by the artist’s own words: “My innermost desires had an oppositional tendency, and that led me to question why meaning or sentiment should be excluded in art”. Such a question is a symptom and a statement of resistance from an aesthetic hysterical subject who appears passive on the outside and inexorable on the inside. Apart from all these, Shadow Series bears a special significance for the artist in that the works serve as a precursor to the elements of ‘freedom in meaning and imagination’ and the pursuit of ‘sensation of matter’, the two focal points of his later artistic endeavors.

Installation view of ‘Who is this’ at GalleryMEME

In his later works, for instance, the Icon series that attached or installed fragments of randomly obtained objets on a canvas, we find a rejection of the aforementioned Korean modernism and an aversion to the dogma and political propaganda of Korean minjung arts that saw a surge in popularity during the 80s. Kwak attempted to transgress the two dominant mainstream movements to pursue the ‘third possible movement thought to have been sacrificed, lost, or repressed’. The minjung art of the time can be understood as having a big common ground with the Korean modernism movement which it antagonized so much. In other words, they are both totalitarian and dogmatic, as, if the latter wanted to legitimize the ‘thoughtlessness of non-representation without meaning or figure’, the former believed in the socialist realism that ‘systemizes figure and purses as a final goal a disciplinary function of art’. This is why, I remember, Kwak took both of these movements as ‘fascist and totalitarian’. In this context, Kwak can be said to be a postmodern hysteria patient who opposes both systems of power while craving for a symptomatic liberation of the repressed meanings. If the aim of art is neither ‘a discipline that inculcates messages forcibly to the readers’ or ‘a desolate absence of narrative and form’, the question comes down to how Kwak creates ‘a work like a matrix where forms, meanings, interpretations, and imagination emerge freely’? I wish to point out two aspects in this critique.

누구세요(Who is that-green), 90.9×72.7cm,캔버스에 아크릴릭, 2024

First is the employment of the characteristics of Vanitas painting, or the characteristics of allegory. If we look at his works from the 90s, for example, Icon series or installations like Om Padmini bhagavata, we find that the fragments of objects randomly obtained, in other words, objets devoid of meanings or contexts, have placed themselves at the center of the works. As the anthropologist Levi-Strauss articulates, “Dust is defined as a thing out of its original place”. These fragments of objets, by traversing the traditional syntax, become a ‘waste’ (not in terms of hygienics, but carry a meaning of ‘a language out of its original place’ or ‘peculiar foreign language’) where the signified (the original meaning) has been lost. Such a situation takes our mind to liberation, aberration, transgression, or even depravity or maniacal laughter. We can compare this phenomenon to the Vanitas painting from the 16th to the 18th century Netherlands. We find their canvases full of old junk, withered and etiolated flowers, skulls, and even animal cadavers. Apart from the series of works Kwak created in the 90s, the same principle applies to his Trompe-l’oeil series that he has been focusing on since the 2000s, in which the artist employs a playful manipulation of the shadows of figures, contours, and the mix of reality and representation to create optical illusions. Despite the humor of these works, they also carry a melancholic allegory entailed by disappeared reality, reminiscent of the movie stills or faded photographs.

친구1 (Mate), 91x73cm, 캔버스에 돌가루, 아크릴릭, 2024

Second is the aspect of ‘laughter’. Taking a look at Trompe-l’oeil or his Shadow series, we find shadows or contours of various figures such as athletes, men and women, and children, that are depicted in a vibe comparable to that of a pantomime or shadow puppetry. These series somewhat remind us of a humorous situation, exemplified by Pissing Farthest, a work that visualizes by painting and installation a scene of the artist urinating far into the air. Another way that Kwak promotes laughter is via ‘optical illusion play’ which sends a different sense of laughter from the characteristics of the aforementioned shadow puppetry. Here, the sense of laughter is closer to being a ‘chuckle’ that comes out naturally when one sees something ridiculous or nonsensical. In highly realistic artworks, such as didactic historical paintings, minjung realism arts, political propaganda arts, or sculptures by the Nazi artists such as Arnold Breker, the systemized and narrativized realistic representation prohibits the audience’s imagination. In Kwak’s series works, however, the system of representation itself is twisted and precarious. Through the deception that arises from the confusion of the mixture of hyperrealistic illusion, contour and shadow, actual object, and neon, or the anamorphous technique that reveals a complete form at a certain point, the artist deceives the audience and makes them chuckle. Chuckle, in that it entails an experience of futility, can be understood in relation to the Vanitas painting as well.

Installation view of ‘Who is this’ at GalleryMEME

Beyond all works of Kwak Namsin there is not only his personal character but his view of art that he has maintained for a long time. He conspicuously declares his aversion to not just Korean modernism or minjung arts but also the movements that are prevalent in the contemporary international art scene. For instance, he is critical of the art that scraps images of crises – global calamities, war and terror, climate change, colonization and exploitation, race and gender problems, etc – and poses as if they bear the cross of a panhuman anguish. I personally find these arts as ‘enlightenment irrelevant to aesthetics’, ‘intellectual fantasy’ ‘fetishistic pseudo-religion’ or ‘false awareness’, and Kwak agrees largely with this view. It seems improbable that a ‘child’ from Nietzsche’s three stages of spirit will find these arts home. Kwak is an artist who believes that art should return to creating works that are smaller, humbler, and more immediately relatable.

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