Ik-Joong Kang

Sunday Star-Ledger, December 9, 1990

Exhibit features thousands of pocket-sized paintings

By Eileen Watkins

 

 

 

A writer may carry in his pocket a small journal, in which to record his every passing thought, and eventually have a piece of work that is interesting enough to publish.

Artists have been known to do the same thing with sketchbooks.  New Yorker Ik-Joong Kang takes the idea a step further, though; he never leaves home without a pocket-sized canvas.

Each of his three-by-three-inch compositions becomes either a painting or a collage, reflecting his mood or observation of the moment.  He groups thousand of these for a startling installation on view through Dec. 19 at Montclair State College.

The Korean-born artist calls his show, in the College gallery, "Ssound Paintingss."  It covers three walls, two of them featuring 3,000 "visual paintings" each, and the center one displaying 1,000 canvases backed with speakers that broadcast sounds.  Although most of his works could be described as introspective and postmodernist, they cover a wide range of styles, from near-realism to constructivist assemblage.

Kang got the idea for the small scale of his individual paintings from the wall tiles he observed in the New York City subways.  He says their square shape, vast number and tiny rows reminded him of Zen art, which utilizes many smaller screens to create its structure.

He began working on the tiny canvases in 1984, and says that since then, "I've never left the house without an empty canvas in my pocket."  Kang works while riding the subway or walking down the street, trough what he calls “the desire of digesting ideas as much as possible, and as quickly as possible.”

The speakers of his sound paintings are controlled by 10 different monitors, each producing one single sound and one visual image.  All are connected by black or red wires, which represent the blood vessels of human body, to a central monitor, signifying the heart.

The Montclair installation nicely captures the onslaught of endless ideas that passes through the human mind, even in the course of one day or one hour.  Spontaneous and uncensored, they include a fair number that are vulgar, in both sexual and scatological terms.  The occasional four-letter words and graphic image do not, however, convey real hostility.  Sometimes the mood expressed is mild irritation, but more oftenit is bemusement at our physical foibles.  In either case, it is often funny.  There is a visual reference here or there to a controversial Robert Mapllethorpe image, underscored by one ironic panel that reads "Safe Art."

Kang's miniaturized graffiti also include rather original religious slogans, such as "I O God" and "God is Power," and pithy observations about nationalism and interpersonal relationships.  Visually, he offers cartoonlike scenes of warplanes and tanks, hovering spaceships and grinning aliens, which could come from the margins of a schoolboy's notebook.  Among these, he juxtaposes more haunting images such as melancholy portraits; silhouettes of lonely, mysterious dogs: sinister snake heads; minimal landscapes, and colorful, freehand, abstract designs.  There are some fairly realistic depictions of birds and insects.

In addition, he creates tiny assemblages built around found objects such as a small propeller, a shapely Barbie doll leg, a plastic flower, a toy bomber, a shaving brush and a glass doorknob.  Nailheads from large, crisp numbers.  A hand-printed phrase may relate to a painted or collaged image - Kang tells us concerning a scrap of sharp metal, "It made my tire flat on a rainy day."  Most of the time, we are given only the provocative statement, such as "I don't paint for the world," "Someday I will leave me," and "Bad Art = Good Art."  One square says flatly, "This is a painting without picture."

The sounds, as far as I could distinguish them during my visit, divide up into three or four types: lilting flute music, Oriental singing, falling rain, and explosions that might have been thunderclaps or crashing waves.  Like the pictures themselves, they merge the natural and the man-made, in a tolerable cacophony.

Kang is now at work on a project called " Journey of Small Paintings," in which he hopes to involve thousands of participants living in seven different countries.  "It allows entrance into the world of diverse ethnic groups and races scattered throughout many countries, to document various situations of creation," he says.  The project is scheduled for exhibition at the Hunterdon Art Center, Clinton, in April 1992.

 

 

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ARTSPIRAL, 1991-WINTER

Sound Paintings

Montclair State College Art Gallery

November 2-December 19, 1990

By Byron Kim

 

 

 

This installation is like a mosaic in which each tile is a discreet object.  On his constant palm-sized format Kang attaches anything that occurs to him as he walks around, looking to make art.  Subsequently, his art comes in the form of plumbing fixtures, dried cat shit, used erasers, advertisements, photographs, dirt, food, glass, you name it.  Kang uses some of the paintings to scrawl notes in his native Korean and in English.  Many of them have cartoonish images in paint, ink or pencil.  His work is the visual equivalent of free association: each painting is a visual entry in the diary of an obsessive young New York artist, like any young New York artist, who wants to get ahead.

 

The artists has compared his work to the tiles on the walls of New York city subway stations and to Japanese Shoji screens, but his installations have more the visual immediacy of storefronts on Canal Street, where hundreds of items are crammed into a window space, each of them winking and blinking for one’s attention.  It’s a dizzying task trying to look at the paintings individually, and in an effort to escape sensory overload, one’s eyes tend to rest on those with bits of text.  Upon examination there are about a dozen or so motifs or categories with which Kang is especially obsessed.  The most telling are the paintings that have simple depictions of mountain landscapes, usually consisting of two outlined humps with a small caption.  Three of them are captioned in Korean script:’

1.      “The mountain is good”  2. “Mountain Road”  3. “Faraway mountain”.  

Another says in English, “I want to live in the mountain.”  These paintings could be seen as parodies of Oriental landscape, but their persistence and simplicity betray a strong sympathy with their Buddhist models.  The scribbled longings for the life of an ascetic coincide well with the audio part of the installation which combines the sounds of traditional Korean music with heavy thunder and rain.  These references to the pastoral and to a “proper” spiritual life can be seen as an antidote to the actual spirit of the exhibition, which is additive, kitsch and all New York.  These few Zen-like references also bring up the possibility that these works are themselves the manifestation of a crazed, peculiarly urbane kind of devotion.

 Some of the paintings serve as conventional acts of atonement, for example on says, “I repent.  Amen.  God. “ Many others come in the form of idiosyncratic confession or resolutions: 1. “I don’ts know what to paint.”   2. “I want to make paintings that last forever.”  3. “I have to be a strong boxer.”  4. “I will never go to Atlantic City again.”  5. “I ate white ginseng = I will be somebody.”  Kang will not treat to the mountains presently; he is busy trying to make sense of life in the big city.

Of course, in Kang’s oeuvre the double-humped mountains can also be read as breasts, to which the artist seems equally devoted.  Having sex and thinking about sex run a close third behind eating and shitting in a world of priorities dominated by art or, more to the point, dominated by making 3 inch by 3-inch paintings.  Kang never leaves home without a blank canvas or two in his pockets.  This modus operandi or two in his pockets.  This modus operandi endows his art with utter immediacy.  His work can be seen as a kind of Beat enterprise for the nineties.  A couple of the paintings propose an interesting purpose for art: “I paint for memory.”  Such a comprehensive and particular endeavor can lead on to suppose that beyond acting as souvenirs, these little pictures actually comprise the artist’s memory.  For instance, one canvas announces, “I sold paintings to Prudential today.  I want to eat sushi tonight.”  Another depicts a somber male face (presumably the artist’s, possibly his father’s)  captioned by the lament, “Dad died.”  To another the artist has affixed a sharp metal object and written, “It made my tire flat on a rainy day.”

Kang’s is a maniacally democratic memory, like a computer’s, where every bit of information, whether life altering or inconsequential, gets equal weight.  However, little revelations about art get more than equal time.  Art means many things to Ik-Joong Kang: 1. “Art is Masturbation”  2. “Art is Energy”  3. “Bad Art = Good Art”  4. “I want to paint is for Fun.”

 A number of Kang’s Asian-American counterparts in the art world make cameo appearances.  One canvas says, “Martin Wong,” beside a long-haired portrait of Wong himself.  Another seems actually to be made by Bing Lee, simply stating, “Bing 1990.” Nam June Paik, a fellow Korean-American artist appears numerously, once associated with the sign for infinity, symbolizing Kang’s hero-worship.  Others are also deified.  Joseph Beuys’ last name is spelled out in Korean letters.  A miniature copy of a Francesco Clemente self-portrait states, “Clemente looks like his paintings.”  Another says, “I think Clement has a sense of humor.”  One canvas epitomizes this hero-worshipping tendency, “Good Artist likes me.”  Transposing one letter in this happy boast would get closer to the point, “Good artists, like me.”

On the most practical level these canvasses are instruments for positioning Kang among these good artists.  3 x 3 inch paintings can fit-in anywhere, and along with their amusing posturing, they can be seen as a strategy for wedging Kang into the art world.  Like a disease his work uses persistence and omnipresence as a survival mode, and, barring a retreat to the mountains, Kang may yet infect us all.  

 

 

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ARTimes, November 1990

Ik-Joong Kang

By Marion Budick

 

 

 

Where does an artist store 1,000 paintings?  If the artist is Ik-Joong Kang, the answer is: in a large suitcase.

Each of Kang’s paintings is exactly 3x3 Inches, that is.  Except for their Lilliputian size, however, most of them are of traditional construction: a standard canvas stretched and stapled to a wood frame.  He works in oil, acrylic, plastic liquid, watercolor and Sumi ink.  Some of the tiny canvases also have found objects attached or arranged in glassed-over “windows” in their centers.

Kang began working in this scale in 1984.  “Since then,” he says, “I’ve never left the house without an empty canvas in my pocket.” He often paints on the street or on subway trains.  In fact, the idea for the small paintings first came to him from the tile walls that line most subway stations. “From a distance,” he explains, “it looks like one big tile wall, but up close, each tile stands alone.”  In his mind it seemed like Zen art, in which, he says, the idea space is 3” x 3”. “It is like a Japanese Shoji screen that divides areas of a house. Each small square is part of a bigger space.”

Kang arrived in the United States seven years ago after receiving a BFA in painting from Hong-Ik University in Seoul, Korea.  Three years ago he received an MFA from Pratt Institute and has since dedicated himself fulltime to painting. “When I first came to this country, everything was so new that I wanted to immerse myself in every new sight and sound and taste.” “From the beginning, Kang began picking things up off the street to incorporate in his paintings, from broken toys to candy wrappers. “Collecting these materials from everywhere I go became an important routine in my daily life,” he says. Kang and his wife now live in Manhattan’s Chelsea district.  His diminutive studio is 20 blocks south on lower Broadway. Although his training has been as a painter, Kang considers himself a performance artist.  His “performances,” which he has given in Soho and Brooklyn galleries, consists of creating his little painting in front of the guests.

To date, Kang has completed some 8,000 canvases, working on 10 or 12 a day.  At first, he sold individual paintings. Then it dawned on him that he was depleting his inventory.  Now he sells an idea for a story that can be assembled in an infinite number of ways depending on the canvases selected and how they are arranged. He also has 1,000 sound paintings.  “I go the idea from a Christmas card someone sent me last year.  It had a melody chip inside that played a tune when you opened the card.” With the help of a computer literate friend, Kang installed tiny speakers behind each 3” square canvas.  Controlled by a MAC computer, 10 amplifiers will eventually connect to 10,000 different speakers, each amplifier controlling 1,000 speakers, from which will come a fusillade of musical sounds from contemporary avant gard to traditional Korean. “I’m trying to create ‘total art,’” he says.  “Traditionally, people went to a gallery just to see art.  I want them to be able to immerse themselves in it, to be able to ‘see and hear’ a painting.  I’d like to convert a gallery into a visual concert hall.”

 

In the near future, Kang plans to travel to several countries in Africa as well as to China and Czechoslovakia. He says he’s like to “conduct” the works and let people from the different countries paint them.  “I want to invite them to play with their imaginations in my world.” An exhibit of 6,000 of Kang’s painting, including 1,000 sound paintings, will be on view at Montclair State College Art Gallery November 2through December 15.

 

 

www. Ikjoongkang.com