A medium of pictorial awakening

Kim, Han-Kook's Thermal Images : the Origin and Evolution 

 - About Works of Kim, Han-Kook -

art critic  Yi, Heui-Yeong

　
From the mid 1970s till the mid 1980s, during Han-kook Kim's early years as an artist, the Korean art world was dominated by two opposing camps: while one group that consisted of so-called progressive and socially-conscious artists embraced realism in belief that the art must reflect the very social environment and issues they were faced with, the other group's main interest was to introduce radical new styles of the Western art. In either way, both parties gave critiques specifically on what they called lethargic monochrome canvas of their predecessors, while attempting to stake a claim of leadership in the years that would follow. Amidst such two extreme trends though, Han-kook Kim seemed to have chosen not to be swayed by either of them, and focus instead on the essence of painting.

In his works during these early years, he candidly laid bare how physical substance of the painting interacts with the mind of the producing artist, and in so doing achieved the much needed vitality that went beyond the said lethargy through his own medium of choice. For the following two decades, i.e. 1990s-2000s, painterliness, doodling, smearing and smudging, etc. were key vocabularies that defined his canvases. During this period, he immersed himself in how his canvas reacts to his painterly gestures, while allowing intermittent pauses. And it was this pause that set his works apart from painterliness of other expressionist artists : his was a monologue of mild, long wavelength, different from violent eruption often found in the expressionist tradition. The physical "trails" left behind by his hand gestures and the pause that allowed a moment of contemplation were key threads that ran throughout his works, differentiating his works from others of the time.
Since the late 2000s, however, Kim has dramatically shifted from such painterliness, and started to present works of a seemingly very different medium. He embarked on exploring and inventing new styles and configuration that seemed to break homogeneity he had maintained till then. He calls such of his latest series as "a worm's eye view", " thermal images", and "mandala", which all indicate changes in perspectives and approaches of experiments. These works are images captured by a thermal camera, processed, edited and printed out electronically through computer. At a glance, one might think of it as a clear discontinuity from his earlier works of painterly gestures and contemplation.
However, it should be noted that as early as in 1999 he already started leveraging digital print-outs; also noticeable is the fact that he has been working both on printing and painting since his very early years as an artist. In retrospect, he said, by the time he fulfilled his own style that was unique and powerful enough to withstand the unilateral authority of the mainstream monochrome trend, he started to feel isolation in his painterly process, which in turn motivated him to explore new media and techniques such as printing or digital print-outs. Also, he tried to expand fluidity and vitality of his brush strokes: by reducing images and its associations on the canvas, he began to allow more spaces on the surface, with far more sparse brush strokes. In this regard, such an attempt could be interpreted as a departure from his previous styles of processing images completely in a monologue, and also a step into a new world of interfacing with his contemporary surroundings as an artist.
In particular, he occasionally tried to incorporate an omnipotent third-person's view so as to overcome the isolation he felt in his first-person monologue. For example, individual images presented in his latest series of thermal images are the ones clearly captured through a third-person's view: images of an ant's devouring its prey and motions of free gymnastics are all presented exactly as they were captured in the view finder of the camera, allowing no room for subjective association of the images. And this is why he chose a thermal imaging device as a new medium in his recent works: seeing it at an airport security checkpoint one day, he said he intuitively sensed its potential to address the issue he was struggling with in his painting.
The thermal imager is designed to detect facts that cannot be captured in conventional views and thus generally used as a means for close inspection in clinical, military and intelligence fields. The instrument interprets subtle differences of heats given off by its objects, and renders such differences in temperature through gradations of colors from red(warm) to blue(cool). And resulting images and colors surprisingly resemble those often found in expressionist paintings.
Given expressionists' strategy which aimed to get their painterliness and minds aligned, it is no wonder that the way their minds dictate painterly trails has something in common with the way the heats dictate gradation of colors. The images captured and printed out through a thermal imager do not have sharp edges that distinguish themselves from surrounding environment, which is another resemblance it has with expressionist paintings in which a sliding brush stroke determines figures and background on the canvas. In this new series, he simply used a computer to control such level of temperature found in his thermal images, just as he previously did with his brush strokes to control the sharpness of such edges on the canvas.
"A worm's eye view" series consist of a wide range of thermal images edited and configured from a worm's eye view. Here, the artist regards the worm's eye view as a perspective diametrically opposed to a bird's eye view: while the latter sees an object along with its environment in a pretty harmonized and conventional way, the former simply focuses on individuality only. As a bird's eye view arranges what's there occupying the environment through a single logical vision as if a bird spots prey from the sky, it is a typical third-person view of the world. On the other hand, what interests the worm's eye view is not a relation between an object and its environment; instead, it focuses only on revealing simply the facts it experiences and witnesses, just as a worm looks at the sky through its tiny hole, and therefore it represents the world seen from a subjective first-person view.
When configuring the thermal images through a computer, Kim paid special attention to highlight characteristics of each individual image rather than trying to align them against its background in a harmonized way. To that end, he gave more efforts in selecting each location of individual images so as to amplify their individual impacts, as opposed to considering what role each image would need to play in its entirety. In such a process, he employed repetition to equalize positions of each individual images in its quadrangular frame. As a result, in most of the works, we find a pattern of symmetrical structure, just like mandala in which a pattern plays a pivotal role in finding position of each deity.
As conflicts arise out of such deliberate lack of consideration on adjacent images, it seems to create clamoring noise which leaves echoes that would never trail off, with its symmetrical repetitive pattern on the surface. To put it differently, individual traits of each image find their own positions in an order that could never be fathomed in our conventional view. And here, as viewers, we find a stark contrast between the symmetrical structure of repetitive images within the frame and the wall it actually is hung on: as if to assert the truth we missed out in our mundane life, it draws a clear line between the obvious truth that's happening there in his works and the complacency of the viewer's perspective which is represented by the very wall. And there it stands, boldly facing personalities of different viewers, while encompassing a wide range of individualities: though originated from three-dimensional images captured by a thermal imager, they are ultimately integrated through a worm's eye view in the first person. And despite such a dramatic shift in his approach, it is the very element that enables his works to maintain continuity of medium he has experimented to date, while confirming its potential as painting.

Invented by Europeans who applied Dorians' views that had given expression to hard stone surfaces through inscription of hallucinatory image, the one-point perspective has long been considered the most legitimate and rational way to view the world: it dictates the way most people see and think, and also serves as a basis for designing and manufacturing lens of all kinds of imaging devices as well as optical instruments. Kim's several attempts witnessed in "a worm's eye view" series, however, presents an opportunity to find another truth that can be delivered in painting, which the contemporary civilization has missed out in our complacency of common sense. 

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