Dawn Portrayed with Light
T. N. Park_Chief Curator, Sungkok Art & Culture Foundation
An artist of light, Kim Sung-ho depicts diverse familiar scenes at dawn with light. His light shines in the ebony dark between midnight and dawn. His light offers a new look at the dawn. For the artist, drawing light is not a mere action of depicting light as it is or encapsulating a scene with light. It is an act of keeping up with his own gaze, healing and soothing vulnerability and admitting potential and greatness. His scenes are thus realistic and hopeful landscapes.
Kim depicts daybreak by adding paints with a knife and brush to ground hues of great diversity. The scenes of dawn created by dynamic impulse for work are in the same context with the natural landscapes he has been consistently interested in and features from his youth. He puts warm glow of a city, asphalt, and harbor at dawn on the canvasdiligently with brush and knife, as if capturing these scenes with a thermal infrared lens. His knife and brush marks overlap, cross, and clash, revealing themselves through light. Hard breaths vibrate and collide here and there in on his canvas. It is a heated scene. His dried breath and long contemplation of the city at dawn are placed on the canvas like warp and weft. They are set with an elastic knife and flexible brush. Kim piles up the vitality of dawn in a deep silence, digging up urban energy. His dawn presents a psychological landscape delineated by his own distinctive brush technique and knife strokes, solidly representing the burdensome mass of a city, the enormity existence, and a sense of reality.
As we all know, dawn is brief. As day breaks, the dark and diverse lights on the street disappear into brightness in an instant. Because Kim captures a fleeting moment of dawn, his dawn is not halted but flows. This is an impression of dawn left deep in his heart as a result of years of observation and effort. His dawn thrashes as if to prove its existence in stark darkness. It is dawn as a bright hope, overcoming darkness. Through a mixture of brightness and darkness Kim admits and condones a psychological boundary rather than underlining a physical border.
He often goes to the mountains and sea to observe the sunrise. He looks up or down mountains and seas, watching the diversely changing views of dawn. He exchanges talks with dawn. Dawn is a home and friend in his heart.
Kim depends on neither obvious, excessive interpretation nor minute description in approaching dawn. He talks with and watches it from a certain distance without intervening deeply. What he depicts is the dawn of contemplation. While in his urbanscapes at dawn he captures the enormous energy, its process and flow slowly or quickly falling asleep or awakening amid a heavy silence, in the scenes of the sea, harbors, and street scenes after rain, Kim portrays the beginning of trivial, hectic daily life in a bright, nimble way. The main palette used to portray urban scenes at dawn is a dark Prussian blue. Like the flickering warmth of life force, he illustrates ripples, thrills, and tension with warm colorful hues. The former is depicted on a large-size canvas drenched with narrative emotion whereas the latter brings about a sticky resonance on a relatively small canvas, provoking a lyric feeling.
For Kim, dawn is life itself and full of energy. It motivates and invigorates his body and heart in awe. It is another world and nature he has long desired. As he uses his knife quite quickly and effectively, his painting’s physical layers may seem thin, but his images show a psychological thickness. His clandestine sensibility is imbued in his scenes in layers like dawn. The layers of love are added one by one with his sincere heart. His dawn also appears arid, but is never crumbly. It sometimes feels wet. Its wetness is not a mere reflection of humid air but a representation of his mental energy and warm heart.
Likewise, Kim’s dawn connotes and embraces all sins and emotions, soothing excessive desire. In this respect, his dried and wet texture and swift knife strokes seem very effective. His work candidly reveals and carefully juxtaposes the structure of desire hiding in a gigantic urban structure, familiar life aspects beginning and ending at dawn, and its inner texture. They are not added but exuded. His day dawns through a unique process of beginning from abstract, conceptual acts of adding lines and dots and generating planes and finishing in figuration. Kim’s early morning light conveys diverse narratives, glittering like glass beads. The light flickering at dawn is not material but works as the motif of hope as something immaterial. It approaches us with a dynamic feeling or the meaning of relaxation. Dawn offers him a hopeful scene when he is tired of living.
There is always light in whatever Kim depicts.His painting is thus bright yet dark at times due to a sensuous impression derived from the involvement of light. Kim’s paintings are surely scenes of life and hope, and a candid landscape raising courage and hope. They are the ‘face of a city with no makeup’. Kim shows scenes of dawn in which viewers envisage the time after dawn. The reason why he sticks to dawn is because it has a strong force. He gazes at dawn without moving an inch. It is a time when people either concludes or begin a new day. He hears the outcry of existence beyond a realistic scene heated again before it is cooled down. Kim meets the profundity of existence, going beyond urban and rural areas, mountains and sea, space and time.
The main motif of Kim’s painting is light. Whether it is natural or artificial light, light is vividly alive in his paintings. It brightens darkness or glitters on the surface of a river or sea or on the road after rain. It is imbued and submerged in wholesale markets, harbors, riversides, seas, familiar village scenes, and trivial street scenes. The light underlines the vitality of all things. Kim’s impulse for hope appears in waves reflecting light, crossing the dark on the surface of a sea. His light responding to dawn rises as if filling a dried day with its fully wet body.
Kim’s dawn is not the dawn we see at the beginning of day but the dawn we breathe together from deep night. It responds with a look and existence only one who has watched for long time can realize. Numerous beings and beautiful things that are usually unknown and unrealized emit light. Kim gathers their seemingly flickering movements. Kim learns from dawn. His light from dawn will shine brightly in the hearts of viewers.
