The review of Solo Exhibition in Sundaram Tagore Gallery, 2009 from Asian Art News

Hosook Kang: The Summation of Nature by Robert C. Morgan

Korean abstract painting is a product of Modernism, but not only from a Western point of view. Abstraction evolved as a concept in Korean art less through painting than through other forms, such as ceramics, textiles, and calligraphy. The ingenious aspect of Korean Modernism is its ability to absorb Western methods and techniques into a style of its own visual articulation. One might call her painting a modality, more than a style. Hosook’s modality as a painter is more about the content of the surface than about the isolation of formal coherence, as one might speak of painting in Western Modernism. Hosook establishes a way of being in her painting that is dependent on the Qi -- the source of energy -- emanating from the interior, from the center of the body in relation to the mind. In this respect, her paintings, laden with color, establish a mood that functions visually through a kind of transcendence – a total and complete absorption with nature and with the natural world. Korean artistic practice is not Western; it is Korean. Therefore, to compare Korean abstract artists, such as Hosook Kang, with early Modernists in the Western tradition -- whether European or American – is problematic, if not inaccurate.

The origins of Korean Modernism go back to the Goreyo Dynasty of the twelfth century. The textile patterns and ceramic decorations modulate a complex patterning that evokes the a concept of energy, strongly related to the influx of Buddhism, but also related to deeper sources in the history and tradition of Korean animism and shamanism in the second and third centuries. In essence, the paintings of Hosook Kang reach back to these origins yet belong simultaneously to a recent tradition in Korean painting understood as the painting of silence. We see this in the work of Lee Ufan and in Park Seo Bo, even in the mulberry paper paintings of Chun, Kwang-young. Hosook carries a thread or a trace of her culture that is indelible and ineffable, a trace that goes back centuries, yet has refined itself in the present. Her paintings are as delicate as air, sumptuous as the rivers cascading through the mountains outside her homeland in Daegu, and as stalwart as the forests and the seasons that allow these forests to filter the air and waters of the sacred Korean landscape.

Hosook works according to a series, that is, groups of images that pertain to the surface, the space of the painting. It is less a pictorial space than a visual encounter with surface energy that evolves from gesture and color. These elements are ineluctably bound to one another. After studying the application of her rhythmic brushwork, her dot patterns, and her overlay or color values and hues, I find it difficult to discern with any degree of certainty exactly how these optical effects are achieved. There is something miraculous about these surfaces – the blues, the green, the white rivulets, falling diagonally as wavy tendrils across the surface, the gentle turbulence of a serpentine configuration, or the triangular wedges that repeat themselves with the utmost discipline of mind, eye, and a thoroughly steady hand. This kind of meditative response to the surface of her paintings is uncanny. It is a quality in Hosook’s painting that is difficult to reconcile or absorb as a method. It is more than an intellectual experience. The veracity and the substance of the Qi – that informs all of her paintings—is beyond the Western intellect, beyond any level of rationalization. It moves with a kind of undeniable momentum towards the realm of the spirit. Therefore, one can speak of Hosook’s painting as a form of transcendence. Western Modernist theorists, such as Clive Bell and Roger Fry, were interested in "significant form"—but somehow this terminology does not translate well in terms of Korean abstract painting. The holding power of form in painting is built not on aggressive stippling of patterns that function as a kind of craft in relation to human perception; but rather the evocation of color depth as each color retains values of their its own, comparative in their consistency with the smooth surface of fourteenth century Celadon vessels. There is something about Hosook’s color that pulls the optic nerve into the color, not in terms of Western illusion, but by way of a meditative power that becomes the determining factor in terms of how we actually see these paintings, and how we envision them as an awakening beyond the mind’s eye. Hosook’s paintings are less about the fantasy of another world than about the actual world of perception. But that world is completely within the realm of nature, and formed in relation to the mind. In the course of mediation (Samadhi), her paintings become one with nature. This might be characterized as the heroic avenue of perception. Through the imminence of the surface – the eternal undulation of these surfaces – we move through and into these miraculous surfaces. We enter into their imminence, which– as the phenomenologist Husserl suggested at the outset of the twentieth century – leads us from immanence into transcendence. We move beyond the commonplace quotidian world into the stratosphere of feeling. For Hosook this stratosphere is about the transformative powers of nature that enters into the mind and body. Her paintings offer us – as the poet William Blake once proclaimed – a kind of "eternal delight." We are situated within the realm of the spirit, within the sphere of the mind, radiating into the environment. This begins the cycle of rebirth, the tempest of a peaceful new beginning, the flourishing of a domain beyond the ordinary, and a place by which to situate ourselves within the eternity of the human soul.

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Robert C. Morgan is an international art critic, writer, artist, curator, and art historian. He holds a doctoral degree from New York University, and currently teaches at Pratt Institute and the School of Visual Arts in New York City. In 2005, he was a Fulbright senior scholar in the Republic of Korea. In 2007, he served a juror for the first International Sculpture Symposium in Tehran. A contributor to many international journals and magazines, he is the author of The End of the Art World (1998).

Painting As Meditation by Donald Kuspit

Hosook Kang is a modernist painter--she’s acutely conscious of the medium, absorbed in its physicality--but she’s a modernist painter with an Oriental edge:  her gestures--sometimes very grand, but more often intimate--have a concentration suggesting that their energy is meditatively focused. They seem chanted and ceremonial rather than aggressively expressionist--careful, delicate, understated acts rather than bold, brash, abrasive actions.  Compared to American action painting, Kang’s painterly acts seem inhibited; but from her Oriental perspective, American action painting seems shamelessly exhibitionistic. 

If abstract art is the consummate means of communicating what Kandinsky famously called “internal necessity,” then it is a matter of the quality of inward depth in abstraction.  In American action painting it means enacting raw feeling, implying that the instincts in which it originates are uncontrollable, while in Kang’s Orientalist action painting it means refining feeling, so that it is brought under ego control and stablized, and can be aesthetically contemplated, that is, incorporated into the conscious self and used to fertilize its growth and understanding.  The goal of Kang’s Orientalist action painting is self-consciousness not self-expression--more particularly, the transformation of self-expression into self-consciousness.  If American action painting is informed by avant-garde primitivism--the climactic statement of the “noble savagery” that Gauguin pursued--then Kang’s action painting is informed by the Oriental ideal of meditative calm, holding its own whatever emotional and social storms threaten it.

There is little or no storm and stress in Kang’s paintings, but a certain sublime serenity, perhaps most evident in a pink and white painting--the white “sky” forming a valley between the pink “mountains,” the whole resembling the upper section of a Valentine heart, or else a woman’s breasts.  These associations are no doubt foolish and misleading, but they convey the delicate eroticism that tinges Kang’s contemplative stance.  The fact that her abstraction is built up of minute, systematically repeated gestures is more to the aesthetic and meditative point.  It is as though Kang has invested her consciousness in every one of the details, counterbalancing their evocative color and expressive movement.  Each is in effect a meditative moment in her own consciousness.  The total effect is of an inwardly luminous atmosphere--a space of sheer transcendence, charged with quiet energy, glorious serenity, and self-assured consciousness.

In the monochromatic paintings--but, like all of Kang’s paintings, they fuse subtly differentiated color tones into a flowing surface--it becomes clear that the whole is implicit in the detail, indeed, an “extension” of its repetition.  The monochromatic paintings seem to be derived from Oriental landscape paintings.  It is as though Kang has distilled them--and the nature that is their point of departure--to their abstract essence.  There is something elemental about the repetitive flow of detail in Kang’s abstractions, but it is the elemental brought under control of consciousness by way of meditation.  In some of the paintings the color blazes--the mingled blue and green shine with inner light--with natural force, in others it is muted and elusive.  It evokes nature at a contemplative remove, but nature that has not lost its force--and internal necessity.  It is as though Kang has articulated the Tao--the ineffable spirit--that flows through everything.   There is a graciousness and fluidity to Kang’s abstractions that can only come from the innocent strength of the Tao.          

There is abstract expressionist storminess in the grandly swirling gestures of a mostly orange and white painting--the curves have a vigor and breadth that convey apocalyptic energy--but there is also an over-all rhythm, keeping them on course, as it were.  In other words, the current is under control--the power of instinct is harnessed for aesthetic purpose.  Clement Greenberg points out that the most aesthetically convincing abstraction has what he called a decorative unity, and Kang’s abstractions are aesthetically convincing by way of their rhythm.  In the monochrome it sounds like a humming tuning fork--recall Kandinsky’s idea of abstraction as visual music--while in the more dramatically expressionistic painting it has a percussive aspect, but the “color sounds” form a fugal pattern. 

This musical intermixture of colors is especially subtle in a group of four small  paintings.  Reading from left to right, we move from a densely packed surface of blue gestures and white highlights to a somewhat more tenuous, transparent surface, in which pure white dominates.  All the paintings are atmospheric, but in the last one it is as though the blue clouds have cleared, revealing a transcendental sky.  In all four works the handling is different--gestures and tones are subtly modified, and the flow and rhythm seem to change--but the sense of elusiveness and ineffability are constant.  Can we say that they are abstract representations of the mood of the sky in each of the four seasons, tracked as they change from one to another?  Kandinsky has emphasized the importance of mood in painting, as a manifestation of inner necessity.  We meditate on the mood of Kang’s paintings, as she meditates on the changing mood of nature, or rather creates an abstract mood in which we become absorbed through meditation.

A diptych composed of two largely green paintings with clusters of yellow pyramids--there is a third painting, similarly colored, which, I think would work very well with them--suggests a similar shifting of mood, but the over-all sense is of agitation rather then serenity.   Gestural flickering intensifies into lightning-like streaks or ominously dark furrows.  Nonetheless, the pyramids, mostly yellow but sometimes green, and sometimes transparent and overlapping, float along, peculiarly detached from the environment in which they participate.  They hold their form--maintain their geometrical integrity--suggesting their transcendental meaning.  Geometry is as much of eternity as we are able to know on earth, Plato remarked, and Kang’s painting is suffused with earthly green.  The stable pyramids exist in the midst of the gesturally moving landscape.  The landscape seems inwardly conflicted, the pyramids serenely transcendental.  Their tension makes the inner power of Kang’s meditational abstractions transcendentally clear.        

<J. Sanders Eaton, magazine gallery & studio, september - october 2005>

Hosook Kang’s Chromatic Orchestrations Capture the Color of Light “I always contemplate empathy with nature when I paint,” states HoSook Kang, a Korean-born artist presently living and working in Brooklyn. “My art can be seen as a moment in silent nature.” Thus the title “From the Silence,” seemed especially apt for HoSook Kang’s recent exhibition of acrylics on canvas at Phoenix Gallery, 210 Eleventh Avenue, in Chelsea, where the radiant auras emanating from the artist’s overall color field compositions seemed to inspire silence on the part of the viewer as well.

The title was applied to the exhibition as a whole, as well as to each of the monochromatic canvases individually (although numbers were assigned to differentiate them from one another). While the initial effect of the paintings was generally monochromatic, each canvas seemingly covered by a single color, on closer viewing each was found, in fact, to be made up of a seemingly infinite number of tiny strokes, dots, or dashes of various colors that cohered to create an actively shimmering chromatic field, much in the manner of pointillism.

Hosook Kang is as uncompromising a painter in her own way as Agnes Martin is in hers. In an era when novelty reigns supreme, she adheres for the most part to a strict formalist aesthetic which allows little leeway for showy flourishes. Her work requires discipline and integrity, the steady application of deliberate and unvaryingly tiny strokes of color carried out over a lengthy period of time, to achieve a final result.

Such exquisite austerity can be welcome and refreshing amid the raucous circus of contemporary art, turning the gallery into a contemplative oasis, when the artist in question is as consummate a colorist as HoSook Kang, who earned her BA and MFA at two leading Korean universities and also studied painting at Pratt Institute, in Brooklyn.

Indeed, Kang does things with color that one is no longer accustomed to encountering, in an art world where subtlety and quietude have become rather rare qualities in recent years. Her hues seem to alternately brighten and dim as one looks at them, approximating the effects of nature light as clouds move across the sky. This is a primarily retinal art and its rewards are many for those who can endure the “silence,” so to speak; who can remain still long enough to bath in and be soothed by the subtle chromatic auras that HoSook Kang generates so skillfully. That said, the ultimate effect of her paintings is first and foremost, aesthetic rather than therapeutic, although it also should be added that these works have a spiritual component in the same way that the paintings of Mark Rothko do. (Indeed, Rothko insisted on the spiritual intention of his paintings to a degree that often annoyed his formalist peers in the New York School, and his attitude anticipated the more permissive approach taken by abstract painters today.) At the same time, however, the paintings of HoSook Kang are as stringent and bracing as they are spiritually nourishing, and this can be a plus for those of us who like to be challenged as well as comforted and enriched by art.

“I’d like to portray the wind and air - even more, all human life, material, and being itself – as abstract work including time and space, “Hosook Kang says, revealing the almost Quixotic ambitiousness of her project. “As a drop of water comes to the sea, dust falls on the mountains, human beings also in the end exist as tiny specks of dust in nature. Accordingly, I describe the endlessly changeable and circular condition of nature by using dots in a general abstract pattern.”

This statement is especially interesting for illuminating the full intentions of a painter whose work might strike some as concerned with formal and optical issues (whatever case those such as myself may wish to make for its spiritual attributes); for it hints at a broader sense of content in her paintings that is essentially postmodern – at least on a conceptual level.

Indeed this statement gives the viewer permission to look beyond the sheer chromatic beauty of HoSook Kang’s canvases, which can be hypnotic, and glimpse the inner vision of the artist when she states, “I imagine a painting as various images like wind blowing in the woods, moving water, flowing clouds, and so forth. I enjoy this thinking and feel boundless freedom in the process of creation.”

And indeed knowing Hosook Kang’s intentions adds an allusive dimension to her work, enabling one to get glimmerings of the subtle subject matter she describes, seeing the movement on the surface of her color fields as more than merely the color of light, catching hints of something swarming and infinite in the molecular multitudes of her strokes. Yet in the final analysis, the true subject of Hosook Kang’s paintings is the infinite possibilities of color itself, explored with separate units of pigment that adjoin or slightly overlap in such a way as to create a unified field unfettered by the overt subject matter of pointillist predecessors such as Georges Seurat.

Hosook Kang, however, does not adhere to Seurat’s quasi-scientific approach. The colors that she applies to the canvas are unmixed, and daubed it on to achieve the effects of modulation by juxtaposition, rather than by blending. They are chosen “intuitively,” to use her own word, and therefore resonate in unexpected ways. That she does not follow a rational, methodical approach invests her paintings with a power and a poetry which transcends even the subtle chromatic shifts she orchestrates so skillfully.