1945–2009 Online Platform for Korean Modern and Contemporary Art

Traces of Being and Expanded Possibilities: The Last 20 Years of Contemporary Korean Printmaking

Lim Dae Geun Traces of Being and Expanded Possibilities: The Last 20 Years of Contemporary Korean Printmaking Source: Exhibition catalogue of Korean Contemporary Prints: A Reflection of a Culture, 37–47. (National Chalcography, The Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Madrid, Spain, September 15–October 15, 1999) Prologue The most fundamental element that distinguishes printmaking from other artistic genres is the fact that the plate and the finished work exist as separate entities. From this separation arise the characteristics typically associated with printmaking—its indirectness and multiplicity. Because the artist devotes the majority of labor not to the print itself but to producing the plate, the site of making and the site of the artwork are inherently different. This divergence ultimately leads to an understanding of printmaking as an indirect process. That very indirectness, moreover, becomes the condition that enables the production of multiples. Yet the subtle sensibilities we experience when encountering a print cannot be fully explained by the terms “indirectness” and “multiplicity” alone. Such a limitation suggests that the actual perception of prints is shaped by far more complex factors. In the sense that a print is completed only by passing through a plate that has been fully realized beforehand, printmaking may be described as an art of “trace.” What we ultimately perceive in a print is the residue left by the plate’s very existence—its passage across the surface. A trace is the mark of something that once existed but has since disappeared. Like Veronica’s veil, upon which the Holy Face is said to have been imprinted, a trace seems to contain an almost transcendental force that carries the presence of the past across time and into the present. Paradoxically, the absence of the original object often intensifies its presence for the viewer. It is akin to the moment when a faded photograph suddenly revives a distant memory with the sharpness of a flash. If so, the distinctive resonance we experience when viewing a print might well be understood as a response to this very trace. The attachment and devotion that printmakers feel toward the plate are almost incomparable in their intensity. Unlike painters, who confront the surface directly, printmakers endure long hours of labor before the plate—hours marked by patience and the acceptance of risks that may lead the work in entirely unforeseen directions. To attain results that are impossible without rigorous planning and control, artists must quiet their impatience and yield themselves to the passage of time. Whether long or brief, an ambiguous and uncertain interval always lies between the making of the plate and the emergence of the final print. Yet the exhilaration that arrives when the artist overcomes that interval and finally lifts the paper from the plate—revealing the “trace” left behind—is a form of emotion that only printmaking can offer. Because the production of a print involves not only the artist’s labor but also the workings of time and physical processes, an awareness of process necessarily precedes concern for the result itself. Consequently, even viewers encountering a finished print are, often unconsciously, led to trace the presence of labor and time embedded within that trace. This paper aims to offer a concise introduction to the artistic practices of the twenty-six Korean printmakers featured in the touring exhibition Korean Contemporary Prints: A Reflection of a Culture (La Estampa Coreana Contemporánea: Reflejo de Una Cultura) held at the National Chalcography, The Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Madrid, Spain. I begin, however, with a discussion of the fundamental attributes of printmaking because, within the developments of the past twenty years, there has been a discernible shift toward understanding and actively engaging the inherent characteristics of the print medium itself—an approach that differs from earlier tendencies. This is not to suggest, of course, that previous prints were produced without an awareness of the medium. Rather, it indicates that artists have become increasingly responsive to broader shifts that compel attention not only to the formal and aesthetic qualities of the finished print but also to its epistemological dimension. In other words, the once self-evident notion that printmaking possesses an independent value—beyond its function as a subsidiary mode of painting—is being newly recognized. The emergence of dedicated professional printmakers, the institutionalization of printmaking education in universities, and the proliferation of printmaking studios over the past two decades all point to this development. In this sense, my introduction to the participating artists’ practices focuses on these broader tendencies. That is, I aim to examine more closely how each artist interprets and understands the print medium in the course of their creative work. For this purpose, I have provisionally grouped the artists into two—“traces of existence” and “expanded possibilities.” The former includes artists who emphasize the very process of making, foregrounding the presence of the plate itself; the latter comprises those who attend less to the procedural dimension and more to the potential expansion of the medium or to the ways in which printmaking is transmitted to and received by viewers. As is often the case when attempting to group artists of markedly different sensibilities, this division is merely a convenient framework and, in the end, inevitably imperfect. Among the participants in this exhibition, there are certainly artists who resist placement within either category, or who could reasonably be situated in both. I therefore wish to note that this classification is intended only as a heuristic—an interpretive device that may offer some measure of guidance in identifying certain characteristics of contemporary Korean printmaking through an examination of specific works. It should be noted that the twenty-six artists included in this exhibition cannot be taken as fully representative of the entire landscape of contemporary Korean printmaking. In Korea today, hundreds of printmakers are actively engaged in practice, each cultivating a distinctive artistic world that stands comparison with any of their peers. In terms of printmaking, at least, Korea is a country that possesses no shortage of exceptional talent. I must also acknowledge my own regret that, due to the constraints of the exhibition framework, a number of outstanding artists could not be included in the final selection. Nonetheless, because the works presented here were chosen through close consultation with the National Chalcography, The Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Madrid, in Spain and based on research materials accumulated over many years by the National Museum of Modern Art, Korea (now, MMCA) I believe that this selection offers a meaningful glimpse into one facet of contemporary Korean printmaking. It is my hope that this exhibition will provide Spanish audiences with an opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of the characteristics of our contemporary print practices. Traces of the Plate, Traces of Existence One of the most widespread misconceptions about printmaking is the assumption that, because it is an extremely flat form of art, its reproduction in printed plates or photographs differs relatively little from the experience of viewing the work in person. Put simply, many assume that a print can be adequately apprehended through photographic reproduction alone. Yet this belief constitutes a critical error—one that readily arises when one approaches the medium solely through logic without the benefit of firsthand viewing experience. If one were given the opportunity to compare an actual print with its photographic reproduction, it would become immediately apparent that printmaking is in fact a medium whose original emotional resonance is exceedingly difficult to capture in reproduction. Precisely because of its extreme flatness, even the slightest relief—details that would be scarcely noticeable in a painting, such as the subtle embossing left at the paper’s edge after passing through the press—becomes an integral element of the viewing experience. Likewise, minute shifts in tone can have a profound impact on the overall character of the work, and the delicate layers created by successive applications of ink can decisively shape the atmosphere of the image. However, the more fundamental reason that a print cannot be fully apprehended through photographic reproduction lies in the very existence of the plate. The plate exists separately from the print, both temporally and spatially; it is where the artist’s labor is most intensely concentrated, yet it remains only as a trace. Its solid, material presence—and the conceptual distance and temporal interval that inevitably arise between the plate and the final print—constitute the key factors that distinguish printmaking from other artistic genres. Because a completed print does not arise from the artist’s direct contact with the surface but only through a plate that has already been fully worked, it is, by nature, an “indirect” product. This indirectness leaves open the constant possibility that a third entity—the plate—intervenes in the relationship between the print and the artist, or between the print and the viewer. Artists carry out their work by investing direct labor into the plate, and they strive to integrate the plate’s presence as closely and purposefully as possible with the aesthetic world they seek to realize. We, in turn, unconsciously gauge the amount and quality of labor inscribed in the plate through the resulting print, tracing the connection between the two. The more seamlessly this connection is perceived, the more fully a print secures its reason for being. And only when that connection is convincingly grounded can we properly assess the artistic value of a print and appreciate, with deliberation, the traces left by the plate. Kim Sangyu’s No Exit (1970) extends the notion of the plate as “trace” into the very subject matter of the work. These three woodcuts appear to illustrate the artist’s philosophical view that “there is no exit from existence or life; the only exit is death, and through death one gradually fades away.” Against the broad expanse of the black background, a small rectangular frame at the center unmistakably evokes the image of a grave or coffin. Within it lies a human figure rendered in a simplified, almost emblematic form—one that becomes progressively fainter from the left panel to the right, as if it were on the verge of dissolving into the surrounding air. What elevates this work beyond the level of mere illustration is the artist’s bold orchestration of space and the subtle presence of the human figure as it emerges through the woodblock. As if the same block had been printed three times in succession with a single inking, the three impressions display gradual shifts in tonal density. This effect derives from the inherent qualities of the woodblock’s firm, resilient surface, which have been employed to striking advantage. If one were to imagine the figure rendered instead with a brush—drawn rather than impressed—one would readily recognize how decisively the fact of its being printed from a block contributes to its distinctive sense of presence. Youn Myeungro’s Anonymous Land is one of a series produced in parallel with paintings of the same title, a practice common among artists of his generation. Having been a leading figure in the Informel movement of the 1960s—which pursued intense, gestural expression grounded in an awareness of the medium’s autonomy—Youn came to recognize relatively early the potential of printmaking. The inherent indirectness of the print medium functioned, for Youn, as a kind of release—an outlet that tempered the unrestrained immediacy of his painting practice, which had relied heavily on direct, forceful engagement with the surface. At the same time, printmaking offered him the opportunity to extend his sustained interest in the materiality of the medium, allowing that inquiry to unfold through the distinct physicality of the plate. From the 1980s onward, Youn’s lithographs developed in a direction that pushed the fluid, intermingling, and resistant properties of grease and water to their limits. In particular, his method of capturing the material in an extremely unstable state over an extended period and fixing it onto the surface of the plate resonates not only with the technical effectiveness of the process but also with his broader artistic ethos—one concerned with “seeing something in what is invisible… and revealing something in what does not exist.” His intention to reconcile such polarities as matter and spirit, chance and intention, presence and absence is realized with even greater clarity through this seemingly paradoxical practice: employing the objective medium of the plate to seize subjective emotion. Setting aside, for the moment, the thematic dimension of Han Unsung’s work, the most distinctive effect of his printmaking lies in his remarkably precise deployment of the plate. Regardless of the subject, his prints are executed with such rigorous calculation and such impeccably controlled manipulation that viewers can readily discern the individual plates involved. Although his motifs appear meticulously and densely rendered, they are, in fact, often printed from no more than four or five color plates. This highly streamlined production process, rather than diminishing the work, heightens the unique sensibility of printmaking by juxtaposing the economy of means with the refined, lifelike detail of the final image. Han’s intention—to reveal a heightened realm of abstraction through highly representational subjects, and conversely, to underscore the imperfect nature of reality through abstract and formally driven means—seems, in many respects, to be more effectively realized in his prints than in his paintings of the same title. In the works presented here, which take peppers and persimmons as their subjects, natural objects are arranged with extreme deliberation and then reinterpreted through the interrelationship of distinct plates, producing a striking tension between artifice and nature. At the same time, the strong lighting binds together the shadows and shaded areas, which, flattened further by the inherent planar quality of the print, become thin like a film across the surface. Through this transformation, the peppers and persimmons shift into ambiguous objects—natural yet somehow no longer natural. In the process, the motifs partially relinquish their original identities and emerge as unique, liberated entities that exist somewhere between the dual realms of human and nature, representation and abstraction. Hwang Kyubaik has been devoted to the exploration of the mezzotint technique since the 1970s, a period when the method had yet to become established in Korea. His work offered a fresh stimulus to Korean intaglio artists of the time, whose practices were largely dominated by etching. The very fact that he confidently embraced a technique that demanded such painstaking labor and was notoriously difficult to handle reveals his temperament as a consummate printmaker. It may also reflect his recognition that the significance of printmaking lies not only in the final visual effect but also in the process of handling—and indeed grappling with—the plate itself. His multi-color intaglio prints condense the long, painstaking hours invested in the making of the plates. The quiet poetic sentiment that permeates his images—drawn from ordinary, everyday subjects—stems, perhaps, from the affection and labor he devotes to the plate, a devotion that resonates palpably with the viewer. Turtle and Rabbit evokes the feeling of a gentle folktale, arranging on a small blackboard-like surface—reminiscent of a children’s toy—various objects imbued with fable-like associations. Rendered with the characteristic precision of mezzotint, the pocket watch, the stub of a pencil, and the stone carvings shaped like a turtle and a rabbit seem to murmur a quiet fable among themselves, and through this delicate articulation his work conveys the sense of discovering an entirely new universe within a world of the infinitesimally small. Kim Seungyeon’s urban nightscapes are exemplary in demonstrating the refined yet quietly contemplative qualities inherent to the mezzotint technique. Unlike daytime views, a metropolis at night possesses a fundamentally planar character, offering little sense of actual spatial depth. The clustering and dispersal of lights, as well as the darkened silhouettes of buildings, register less as distinct distances or volumes than as arrangements of surface and shape. In other words, the scene already contains an aesthetic beauty that emerges through representation alone. It is the movement of light—disrupting solid forms and generating new visual orders—that becomes the central dynamic at play. Kim Seungyeon’s printmaking involves the painstaking process of tracing and capturing each individual light upon a meticulously prepared mezzotint plate. Through this long and arduous undertaking, the artist seems to participate in the quiet narratives concealed behind the city’s luminous surfaces. Although photographic references may be involved, the extended duration required to create the plate inevitably means that the structure of the city and the sensation of its lights are reassembled through the artist’s memory and imagination. This is precisely why the distinctive atmosphere of narrow foreground alleys—easily overlooked amid the density of the urban nightscape—is brought into such sharp emphasis. It reflects the artist’s profound affection for his subject. As a result, his prints reveal to us the multitude of individual presences that lie hidden behind the impersonal visage of the city—presences that photography alone can seldom capture. In Kang Seunghee’s urban scenes, the artist’s subjective interpretation is far more pronounced. For him, the city is not merely an objective subject but a kind of symbolic object. By choosing the specific moment of dawn, he captures yet another hidden face of the metropolis—one distinct from Kim Seungyeon’s vision. Day Break, Summer seems to reveal how the familiar, dinosaur-like mass of the city slowly awakens from sleep. As the faint dawn air struggles to slip through the forest of towering buildings and rouses the smaller structures in the foreground, the massive forms in the background remain sunk in darkness. Only the timid glow of a traffic light and a streetlamp, barely lifting their heads, signal the beginning of a new day. The deep blacks—built up through countless cycles of scraping and biting the plate—faithfully convey the volume and weight of this languid hour. It is the very moment when, as the artist describes, the “aesthetic permeation” that transforms external cityscapes into internal ones has just begun to take shape. In his approach to constructing landscape, Kim Jong-eok presents an intriguing contrast to the two artists discussed above. Working with vertically oriented blocks that preserve as much as possible the natural grain and form of the wood, Kim inscribes—patiently and deliberately—the memories of the mountains he has personally traversed. Rejecting Western perspectival conventions, he adheres instead to the multi-perspectival tradition of East Asian landscape painting. His images evoke the sensation of ascending a mountain path: along the vertically unfolding ridges appear the many impressions encountered during his ascent—a small tobacco shop at the foot of the mountain, an unexpected bus stop partway up the slope, a magnificent pine standing alone along the trail, the secluded temple hidden deep within the forest. Each of these memories assumes a firm, tangible presence through Kim’s characteristically embossed woodblock technique, becoming solid forms anchored within the composition. Kim Jong-eok remarks that “when the human presence is excluded from landscape, it remains merely nature; but when traces of human spirit permeate that nature, it becomes jingyeong—a real view that embodies lived reality.” His work emerges from the traditional East Asian conception of nature in which the artist neither observes from outside nor imposes artificial alteration, but instead enters into the landscape and seeks to become a part of it. In Oh Seayoung’s The Story of Forest, the motif of the tree operates as a symbolic vessel that collectively embodies the emotional sensibilities of the Korean people. The artist conceives the tree’s constituent elements—its roots, trunk, and leaves—as a site where humanity, history, and myth converge, referring to it more broadly as the “history of humankind.” In the gradually brightening sky, the moon still lingers, while the firmly rooted trunk is composed of intertwined human figures—men and women embracing one another. The multitude of people striving to ascend the tree may well be read as reflections of ourselves, struggling within the flow of history. The rounded form at the top of the tree—suggestive of an ultimate ideal realm—unfolds in an arabesque-like configuration created through the bold, incisive lines characteristic of woodblock carving. The serpents woven into the branches function as symbols of wisdom, while the mystical bonghwang, or better known as phoenix, appearing between them contribute to the vision of paradise. Within this single tree, the artist distills his optimistic and affirmative worldview. Shin Jangsik’s woodblock prints likewise begin with traditional Korean motifs. Favoring subjects deeply rooted in the cultural consciousness—such as ornamental patterns, cheongsachorong lanterns, and Geumgangsan Mountain—the artist appears at first glance to be directly addressing the question of tradition. Yet he seeks to draw our attention not to the literal or surface meanings of these motifs, but to the atmosphere they radiate into their surroundings. To this end, he exploits the natural properties of the woodblock, overlaying recognizable forms with distinctive scraped marks that partially obscure them. Arirang—A Joyous Day also employs the cheongsachorong, a lantern traditionally present in Korean wedding ceremonies. According to the artist, the lantern—whose illumination dispels darkness and conveys joy—embodies “the optimistic and pragmatic will to live” characteristic of the Korean people. Through the repeated iteration of this image, Shin displaces its representational function and transforms it into a vehicle for abstract emotion. As we follow the restless, scored traces across the surface, we find ourselves enveloped less by a specific object than by the atmosphere it generates. From the standpoint of “scraping” the woodblock, Park Young-geun’s technique initially calls Shin Jangsik’s to mind. Yet while Shin’s lines tend toward warmth and emotional resonance, Park’s are the product of a dynamic process so forceful that they verge on the geometric. Using an industrial grinder to score the surface of the block with rapid, sweeping motions, he produces unexpected effects that generate an extraordinary sense of density and tension across the entire image. One might describe the result as the literal collision of civilization and nature. His woodcuts—records of intense bodily movement captured in the moment—ultimately produce forms that emerge slowly from a darkened ground, taking on the appearance of something akin to a nightmare. There is little doubt that the term “Holy Grail” immediately evokes a sacred object of religious veneration. Yet what the artist intends here goes beyond the symbolic register of religion; it invites a more fundamental inquiry into the nature of existence itself. To this end, any recognizable form had to be obscured as fully as possible by unfettered lines, and the original structure had to be distorted—much like a blurred or shaken photograph. As a result, the image of the Grail, once a solid three-dimensional object, dissolves into space, leaving behind only the trace of its former presence. What remains serves merely as a cue that shifts our perception from the material to the immaterial, from the physical dimension toward a more spiritual one. Kim Yongsik’s Eternal & Limita series likewise makes full use of traditional printmaking techniques while placing emphasis on the ways in which those methods can be shaped into form. The cross-shaped plate unmistakably evokes a potent symbol, and together with the metaphysical title, it signals that the artist’s work is closely tied to the notion of a transcendent presence. According to Kim, human life unfolds within limits that cannot be overcome by human capability—life and death, success and failure—and within those confines, one tries, however vaguely, to realize one’s “wish in life.” In other words, because the human being is inherently singular and finite, life becomes a search for salvation or an encounter with an absolute, supernatural power capable of overcoming those limits. The human condition, he suggests, is defined by the simultaneous possession of both “eternity and limitation,” a paradox inherent to existence. To reconcile this tension, Kim brings together abstract fields of color and concrete figurative forms within a single pictorial space, allowing the two to coexist. Among the artists in the exhibition, Oh Yiyang is relatively young, yet in his passion for printmaking and his artisanal temperament he yields to no one. Whether in his persistent engagement with questions of the self or in his near-obsessive pursuit of technical perfection in intaglio processes, his efforts ultimately converge on a single point of inquiry: the problem of “existence.” The works presented here display a more simplified and abstracted appearance compared to Oh Yiyang’s earlier, more complex compositions. Although their visual form has shifted considerably, the artist’s preoccupation with the problem of existence remains unchanged. At the foundation of Oh’s work is fundamentally organized around a linear trajectory—a progression toward a pure, essential goal. Even the subtle, emotionally resonant ovals function as stages in an ongoing movement toward the completeness of a circle. The artist describes his work as “an attempt to expose life—an invisible existence—through a dialogue with cold metal.” This dialogue unfolds through the endlessly repeated processes of etching and corrosion. The deeply embossed relief that remains on the printed surface ultimately serves to remind the viewer of the forceful, persistent presence shared by both plate and artist. Expanded Medium, Expanded Possibilities One of the defining characteristics of contemporary Korean printmaking over the past two decades has been the pursuit of the medium’s expanded possibilities. The Minjung print movement of the 1980s became a crucial catalyst, prompting Korean artists to actively explore the potential of printmaking as a vehicle for public communication. Subsequent generations of printmakers, to varying degrees, could not help but be shaped by the legacy of that movement. Building on this shift in perspective, artists from the late 1980s to the present have continued to explore ways of extending the inherent properties of the medium—its “indirectness,” “multiplicity,” and other latent potentials embedded within its foundational structure. Among these developments, artists who focused on the multiplicity of printmaking naturally turned their attention to the medium’s quantitative dimension. This interest, however, extended beyond its simple capacity to produce numerous impressions; it also reflected a deeper engagement with the popular meanings and attributes inherent in the medium itself. The fact that prints produced in multiples each possess equal value realizes a form of “equality of value” among the editions. At the same time, because every impression contains within it the entire creative process, each one also ensures an “equality of viewing,” granting every viewer access to the work in its complete form. Because editions exist, a broad audience can encounter the same work simultaneously in multiple locations transcending time and space. Moreover, each act of viewing constitutes a complete experience of the original—not an imperfect encounter mediated through photographic reproductions or virtual networks, but an authentic engagement that carries the work from the artist’s initial touch to the present moment. The inherent egalitarianism of the print medium naturally gave rise to an awareness of its potential audience—namely, the broader public. In the process of establishing printmaking as a significant component of contemporary Korean art, the long-standing virtue of the medium—its capacity for communication with the masses—re-emerged as an important value, rather than a secondary consideration. This became especially pronounced in the 1980s, when socially engaged art movements came into full force and advocated a return to a “healthy art” that could breathe among the people. Within this context, printmaking gained renewed prominence as a fundamentally “democratic” artistic medium. These artists achieved distinctive artistic results by combining traditional Korean woodcut techniques with influences from the Mexican popular print movement. A series of experiments sought to harness the simple yet forceful effects of the woodcut, and boldly simplified forms began to dominate their compositions. This visual language aligned effectively with their radical messages, which aimed to denounce the social contradictions of the time. Prints produced in this manner spread rapidly through key printmaking galleries—especially smaller spaces that had begun to engage actively with Minjung artists. At the same time, the reorganization and revitalization of print workshops and distribution networks played a significant role in the development of Minjung art. Ultimately, the ideological orientation of the 1980s Minjung print movement—its effort to narrow the gap between art and life—not only redirected attention to printmaking as a new means of communication but also prompted a renewed examination of the medium’s fundamental possibilities and limitations. Hong Sungdam, one of the leading figures of the Minjung print movement in the 1990s, translated into woodcut his memories of the collective power of the people—an experience he had directly witnessed during the Gwangju Democratization Movement. His Gwangju series, intentionally rendered with rough and seemingly unrefined carving, revealed the tragedy of Gwangju more urgently than any photograph could at a time when the press was under strict government control. The figures, depicted through stark, forceful lines, embody the emotional resilience of ordinary people enduring a period of profound hardship. At the same time, by accentuating the deeply human qualities of each individual figure, Hong achieves a form of realism distinct from the more typified representations of the people found in the work of Oh Yoon, another major Minjung printmaker. The artist’s deep attachment to human diversity is clearly reflected in his belief that “human life is paramount under any circumstances and safeguarding that life requires that diversity be protected first.” As a result, his works allow us to sense, alongside the documentation of violent and blood-stained events, both a poetic cadence and a profound affection for his subjects. Following his release from prison, Hong’s active engagement as a human rights advocate—pursued in parallel with his artistic practice—further testifies to his enduring commitment to humanity. The works Sword Dance and Sickle Dance included in this exhibition form part of Hong Sungdam’s later “talisman” series. Through the motif of the talisman, Hong attempts to integrate the direct realism of his earlier works into a more symbolic system. By visually reconstructing ritual movements meant to expel malevolent spirits and ward off calamity, the artist effectively stages a shamanic rite that seeks to console the accumulated sorrows of the Korean people. Hwang Jaihyoung , meanwhile, has lived in a mining village from the 1980s to the present, participating in the daily labor of miners and striving to render their lived realities in his work. Whether in painting or print, his images invariably bear the palpable presence of sweat from the labor site. His depictions—miners crouched over their lunch with their helmets still on, eating with hands calloused by years of work, or a laborer overcome by nausea amid the harsh conditions of coal extraction—reflect not the gaze of an outside observer but the empathy of a companion. In addition, the artist often chooses to print not on conventional printmaking paper but on discarded materials found in daily life—tax invoices, wage receipts, or wrapping paper—thereby seeking a more direct convergence of art and lived experience. His view of labor, expressed in the belief that “to labor is to rise from the chains of fear and the nightmare of hunger, to do human work, and to stand on human ground,” is pursued with equal rigor both formally and thematically. Min Joungki’s Gate For a Forest series is unusual among artists of the 1980s, who were largely focused on social messages, in that it also displays a pronounced formal interest. In these works, the artist renders the figure of a woman leaning diagonally at the threshold of a forest in lithography and then overlays scenes from twentieth-century history through silkscreen, thereby directly superimposing individual life with its broader social conditions. The woman’s nude body symbolizes not only the violated bodies of Korean women who endured tumultuous historical forces, but also the ravaged landscape of the nation itself, wounded by war and division. Although she stands on the brink of a lush, life-giving forest—a space that might serve as a site of deliverance—she appears depleted, facing instead the somber images of war. Through the juxtaposition of feminine and masculine imagery, the artist articulates a new dimension of social commentary. The Minjung print movement of the 1980s ultimately provided a framework through which subsequent generations came to recognize printmaking as a vehicle for social commentary. Among the artists who have inherited not only the formal characteristics of Minjung printmaking but also the ideological commitments of their predecessors is Jung Wonchul. The subject Jung Wonchul addresses in his Portrait series is one of the most painful wounds in modern Korean history: the issue of the so-called “comfort women,” who were forcibly mobilized by the Japanese military during the Pacific War. Depicting the present-day faces of these women with extraordinary precision, the series gains heightened vitality through the artist’s characteristically meticulous rendering. Exploiting the flexibility and fineness of the linoleum block to its fullest, Jung produces images so vivid that they feel almost unfamiliar. It is through this unsettling immediacy that he seeks to reveal the brutality of the historical violence inflicted upon these women. The gentle, warm expressions of the elderly sitters paradoxically lay bare, with even greater force, the significance of a time that we have begun to forget. In these woodblock prints—crafted with a care reminiscent of tracing each wrinkle etched into their faces—one senses a profound, almost devotional solemnity. Kwak Duckjun’s Event–Relation series depicts the existential condition of the individual, grounded in the artist’s own experiences living as a Korean resident in Japan. The polygonal form floating like a balloon in midair signifies society as a collective entity that exists apart from the individual, while the artist’s solitary figure, distanced from it, highlights his distinct individuality. Here, the artist appears as a foreigner—one who can never fully belong to society yet cannot be entirely free from it either. The thin string that binds his body and connects him to the larger community symbolizes the fundamental dilemma between self and society that lies at the heart of the artist’s inquiry. The 1980s was a period in which, beyond the communicative potential of printmaking discussed earlier, artists engaged in an expansive reexamination of the medium’s inherent characteristics and limitations. They began to interpret printmaking with greater freedom, moving beyond the constraints of traditional materials and techniques. Unlike earlier artists who pursued the possibilities of printmaking strictly within its established parameters, this new generation approached the medium by situating their subjects outside the conventional domain of printmaking and by exploring its potential from multiple angles. As a result, works emerged that could not easily be accommodated within the traditional conception of printmaking—whether in terms of materials or conceptual framework—and the possibilities of the medium were extended to an unprecedented degree. Ha Dongchul’s recent engagement with the realm of rubbing, following his earlier silkscreen explorations on the theme of “light,” offers yet another perspective on the expanded possibilities of printmaking materials. Rubbing is a traditional East Asian method of recording relief surfaces—such as inscriptions or decorative patterns—by adhering dampened hanji (Korean mulberry paper) to the object and tapping ink onto its surface to capture its form. Originally employed as a means of documenting important historical or archeological materials, Ha seeks to revive this technique as a contemporary printmaking practice. In Ha’s work, the “plate” is not an object that demands newly invested labor but one that has already been shaped over time. In this respect, his practice diverges significantly from conventional notions of printmaking. The work Time and Space, featured in this exhibition, begins with the selection of a heavily weathered wooden mortar whose eroded surface already bears the accumulation of time. Yet this act of selection differs entirely from the Dada concept of the ‘readymade.’ Rather than choosing a manufactured object or a historical artifact, Ha selects a familiar household item marked by his own touch and daily use. The process of transferring its form onto hanji, strand by strand, becomes—before it is a conceptual gesture—a kind of personal memorandum, a way of inscribing his own lived time. The work is completed by adding letters or symbols in silkscreen over the final rubbing, introducing layers of ambiguity and doubling of meaning. The numbers inscribed on the surface point both to the time the object has endured and, through their endless repetition, to the East Asian notion of cyclical rebirth. What emerges is, in effect, a collaborative work between the “sacred nature” of the object and the artist himself. Kang Airan explores yet another possibility of printmaking by attaching aluminum castings directly onto the picture surface. The motif of the “bottari” (bundle)—a recurring subject in her earlier work and one that has become something of a personal signature—appears again here. Whereas her previous works focused primarily on depicting its outward appearance through traditional printmaking techniques, the pieces presented in this exhibition mark a shift toward investigating the essential properties of the print medium itself. Insofar as the work exists in multiple editions, it remains connected to the lineage of traditional printmaking; yet the resulting images differ little from conventional paintings. Moreover, by employing aluminum—typically used as a plate material—as the medium of representation, she produces an intriguing reversal in which the conventional relationship between plate and print is inverted. Yet, as the title suggests, Kang Airan’s fundamental interest does not lie solely in an investigation of the medium. Rather, through her shift in materials, she appears to pursue another, more affective approach to the motif of the bottari. For Kang, the bottari occupies a threshold between freedom and constraint, and serves simultaneously as a kind of fetishized object through which she can project aspects of herself. Ultimately, regardless of how its form is rendered, the bottari functions as a vehicle for an inward journey, which remains the core of the artist’s inquiry. Kwak Namsin’s INRI demonstrates yet another convergence of printmaking and casting techniques. The work begins with impressions of workers’ fist marks pressed into a clay ground, onto which the artist layers additional religious associations. It extends the long-standing concerns that have preoccupied him—questions of existence and trace, of matière and plate, of myth and history. Yet above all, it is the artist’s distinctive wit and sensibility that animate the work and allow it to breathe. Viewed through a magnifier, the blades of grass—brought into extreme close-up—inevitably lose their original connection to nature and are transformed into new, unfamiliar entities. Chung Sanggon prints these altered images onto a variety of materials, including handmade paper, cloth, vinyl, and hanji, making full use of the capacities of digital technology. Yet unlike many computer-graphics–based artists, Chung minimizes artificial manipulation of the subject, seeking instead to offset the sharp resistance and sense of estrangement that often arise between the computer and nature. This approach appears to stem from the artist’s own warm affection for natural forms, and at the same time signals his desire to approach the essential core of the subject. Yim Youngkil’s silkscreen works may be described as collaborative productions between printmaking and media such as computers and video. Often conceived as pairs with his video pieces, his prints develop along two primary axes—form and content—through which he establishes a tightly interrelated structure. At times, the formal dimension reinforces the content; at other times, the content supports the form. It is this balance and reciprocity between these two fundamental elements that enables the compelling force of his printed works. In the Armed Aquarium series, we glimpse the artist’s pointed critique of contemporary civilization. By using the aquarium—an artificially “constructed” natural environment—as his motif and juxtaposing its artificial plants and clichéd waterwheel ornaments with the unexpected image of a military submarine, the artist symbolically exposes the kitsch and absurd dimensions of modern culture. Moreover, the near-mechanical precision with which each component is rendered lends additional weight to the force of his commentary. Furthermore, by incorporating computer graphics and video into his practice, the artist probes yet another set of possibilities for printmaking. These prints can be reproduced indefinitely through digital means, and any still frame extracted from a video can, the moment it is printed, acquire the status of an autonomous print. Conceptually, this implies the potential for an infinite number of distinct works to be derived from a single source image. The ontological questions this raises concerning the very existence of the print constitute another driving force in Yim Yougnkil’s work, and in seeking answers, he pushes the latent possibilities of the medium to their furthest limits. Epilogue The inherent indirectness and multiplicity of the print medium offer a distinctive arena of experience for both artist and viewer. This experience arises, on the one hand, from the way in which multiple editions allow for the sharing of what is traditionally the mythic aura of the unique, one-of-a-kind artwork, and on the other hand, from the fact that each edition nonetheless retains the integrity of a complete, fully realized presence. The distinctive sense of presence and temporality that arises from the separation between plate and print, together with the additional existence of the edition, which enables new forms of communication, constitute qualities unique to printmaking that create a space of reciprocal experience between the public and art. The fact that a large audience can, through a single work, simultaneously share an experience of life and existence is precisely what endows printmaking with its “democratic” character—allowing it to narrow the distance between art and everyday life from a renewed perspective. In this sense, printmaking—rich with such potential—deserves recognition as a new form of “pictorial” art capable of overcoming, in a different dimension, the limitations traditionally associated with painting as the dominant two-dimensional visual medium. *Source: Lim, Dae Geun. “Traces of Being and Expanded Possibilities: The Last Twenty Years of Contemporary Korean Printmaking.” In The Discourses and Fields of Korean Contemporary Prints, 1958–2008 (Gwacheon: Korean Contemporary Printmakers Association; MMCA, 2007), 280–289.