Ik-Joong Kang

Art Asia Pacific, Number 19, 1998

LIVING ON THE EDGE

Borders and cultures in the work of Ik-Joong Kang

By Joan Kee

 

 

 

Sporting round glasses to match his round, wide-eyed face, Ik-Joong Kang looks less like a tortured artist than he does an 'accountant' (as he describes himself), or perhaps a deceptively mild-mannered bureaucrat. Beneath the misleading demeanour, however, is an artist most adept at exploring cultures and exploding boundaries. At times flamboyant, poignant and jocular, the small 3 x 3 inch (7.6 x 7.6 centimetre) canvases that form the basis of Kang's work have a simplicity that transcends the usual diet of angst so prominent in the work of many Asian-American artists. Unlike many of his more solemn and sometimes dour Korean counterparts, Kang has a playful style and exhaustive repertoire of materials that traverse and amalgamate different cultures. For Kang, the fascinating aspect of culture is its potential to embrace other cultures, and in his works from 1988 to 1997 his exploration of a multitude of ethnic and local cultures redefines boundaries that once limited definitions of 'culture'.

Ik-Joong Kang has always had an affinity with the idea of borders. Rather than defining the border as a hostile obstacle or point of tension a la the DMZ (the demilitarised zone dividing North and South Korea), Kang perceives it as a place to absorb and digest the cultures of both sides. Growing up near Seoul's Itaewon, a neighbourhood of Korean souvenir shops, seedy bars and restaurants catering to the tourist trade near the United States army base, the artist quickly assimilated and digested this border culture. Although Itaewon was and is considered by many Koreans to be a cultural no-man's-land, Kang was intrigued by the coalescence of American culture with the huckster attitude of the Korean shopkeepers. Today, Kang's own studio is located on the periphery of Chinatown in New York and his early works, such as One Month Living Performance, 1986, and 6000 Paintings, an installation that featured in the 'Broadway Windows' exhibition in 1988, showcase Kang's fascination and struggle with American culture.

Leaving what he considered a stifling training in academic drawing at the well-regarded Hong-Ik University in Seoul, Kang emigrated to the United States in 1987. In New York City he began his series of small works on canvas as he commuted from Brooklyn's Pratt Institute to his part-time job at a flea market in Far Rockaway, Queens. This commute was in itself another passage between seemingly disparate realms: the 'high' art taught by the fine arts program at Pratt and the 'low' kitsch of the flea market. His choice of the 3 x 3 inch format reflects his merging of the two realms: on one hand, the size is the standard of perfection in Zen thought and is found in shoji screens and traditional wooden sake containers,1) and on the other hand, as Kang readily notes, the dimensions are equivalent to the distance between the eyes, a size that would 'appeal to the public who, after all, must be able to comprehend and enjoy what they are seeing'. The exquisite melds with the ordinary.

But Kang's most lissom merging is his penetration of 'low' or common culture into the rarefied sanctuary of galleries and museums, such as branches of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Kang often compares his own work to the Korean dish of 'bibimbap', a hodgepodge of vegetables and meats mixed with rice that is an everyday meal found on any street corner in Korea. Banal items like rubber stamps and plastic magnets are prominently placed in many of Kang's canvases. Despite the fact that many of his earlier works were produced from the perspective of the newly arrived immigrant, it is evident in his later work that Kang is a first-generation Korean-American and a voracious consumer of all cultures.

Sound Paintings, an installation at Montclair State College in New Jersey in 1990, revels in the ordinary. Among its 7000 canvases, viewers can find everything from a romping, Keith Haring-like tiger to the ubiquitous New York City subway advertisement for parenthood counselling that reads, 'Pregnant? We Can Help'. Inspired by a 'singing' Christmas card 2), Kang installed tiny microchips emanating various city sounds in 2000 of the wooden blocks in the installation. Combined with the pinks, blues and yellows of the paintings, the sound from the canvases approximates a slice of life in New York City. This impression is reinforced by the severe alignment of the canvases into orderly rows, paralleling the perpendicular streets and avenues of Manhattan. By virtue of the installation's sheer size and the range of questions that the artist asks himself in each canvas, Kang compels the viewer to share his wonder of New York, his 'New World'.

The peregrine Kang crosses even more boundaries in Throw Everything Together and Add, a 1994 installation at San Francisco's Capp Street Project. He illustrates his concurrent intimacy with Korea and the United States in works that juxtapose drawings of gunboats reminiscent of the Korean War with flimsy sailboats alluding to the amusing plight of the stranded inhabitants of 'Gilligan's Island' - a popular American sitcom of the 1970s. On a more local level, the work details Kang's meandering through the very distinctive and disparate neighbourhoods of Manhattan: his references to museum fixtures such as conceptual artist Joseph Beuys and Kang's hero, Nam June Paik, signify the art establishment located in the Upper East Side and SoHo, while spools of thread and tiny decorative tassels are a miniature facsimile of the textile-related objects and other bric-a-brac sold on Canal Street, at the boundary between SoHo and Chinatown. Far from appearing as contrasting symbols of irreconcilably different worlds, however, Throw Everything Together and Add deftly blends these elements into a cultural buffet at which any viewer can easily discover familiar icons and items.

Not content merely to wander, however, Kang's 'English' series demonstrates his ceaseless attempts to cultivate a knowledge of American culture. Like a hardworking Korean student preparing for his entrance examinations, in his 1994 installation English Learning Drawing Kang studies English vocabulary taken from the graduate record examination. The densely written words and their corresponding Korean translation resemble flashcards or noryukjang.3) These sheets later formed the basis of English Rice Field, 1996, a personification of Kang's effort to plant and cultivate knowledge. Neatly mapped out on the ground in long strips similar to the paddy fields found throughout rural Korea, the tiny words resemble seeds that the artist has sown. This is a three-dimensional rice field, however, as the process of cultivation and planting takes place on two adjoining walls. Carved in woodblocks and stamped onto reams of paper, more English words in various primary colours adorn the walls and are reminiscent of the thirteenth-century Tripitaka Koreana, the oldest and most complete set of Buddhist scriptures, which are carved into 31,137 woodblocks.4) Kang accordingly intertwines references to traditional Korea with his fervent and current study of English.

Yet not all of Kang's travails celebrate all cultures or all attitudes towards a given culture. He frequently uses popular iconography such as chocolate as a means of satirising stale hierarchies and undiscerning attitudes. 8490 Days of Memory, 1996, is Kang's humorous perception of a once-powerful American coloniser, invoked through memories of his childhood in an impoverished, war-torn Korea of the early 1960s. The work is a colossal effort depicting a gargantuan, almost three-metre high chocolate statue of General Douglas MacArthur. At MacArthur's feet are 8940 clear plastic cubes containing small tokens of Korean childhood, such as a pencil-shaped eraser and a pair of doll's shoes. The title of the work refers to the number of days Kang spent in Korea before coming to the United States.

Kang equates chocolate with the sweet promise of the American dream that beckoned poverty-stricken Koreans in the 1960s and 1970s. An almost non-existent luxury in Korea, chocolate was tossed by American soldiers to Korean children. It symbolises the sweetness of American plenty while its silver foil wrapping is a literal representation of the glittering promise of wealth and the American dream. Kang drives this point home by incorporating a large statue of MacArthur, who gained a place in Korean hearts by masterminding the Inchon landing, a crucial turning-point in the Korean War.5) Kang's inflated statue of MacArthur is reminiscent of Andy Warhol's blown-up silkscreen images of larger-than-life celebrities such as Mao Zedong and Marilyn Monroe.

For Kang, chocolate is a metaphor saturated with allusions. It is a positive metaphor in the sense that it 'represents the wealth of the Americans, which eventually enabled South Korea to climb from its dirt-poor, war-torn aftermath in the 1950s'. However, Kang also uses chocolate to portray the United States as an appropriator or coloniser. Kang states that the choice of chocolate in 8490 Days of Memory 'was especially relevant for this project given the fact that chocolate has been appropriated by so many countries that claim it as its own when, in fact, it originally hails from Mexico'. In Kang's work chocolate symbolises the often deleterious relationship between Korea and the United States, as the chocolate 'may taste sweet, but when eaten over a period of time, results in a range of health problems like tooth decay'. The suffocating prevalence of chocolate in 8490 Days of Memory denotes the wholesale acceptance of the culture of the United States by Koreans and the resulting decay of traditional Korean culture as it is displaced by slavish imitation of western trends. The metaphor of chocolate is a double entendre in this work: when exposed to heat it rapidly melts, paralleling Kang's perception of the United States' waning military power in both Korea and the world. By creating a giant statue of MacArthur in chocolate, a perishable medium, Kang undermines the construct of an omnipotent United States.

Kang wants viewers to embrace different cultures. Says the artist, 'Learning is a two-way street and in the twenty-first century, we need to give and receive'.6) Awarded a citation for special merit at the 1997 Venice Biennale, Kang's 'Learning' series reflects his ideal of reciprocity between artist and audience. In I Have to Learn Chinese, 1997, the title's imperative tone urges the viewer to join the artist in memorising its cloisonne-like strips of Chinese characters. Comprised of ninety poplar panels, the elongated rectangular forms epitomise Kang's desire to 'grow into a big tree that does not fall'.7) The panels join together to form a trunk with roots deeply embedded in the past, a past that: 'both the individual and the nation should know about. People talk about globalisation, but in order to accomplish that we have to really plunge ourselves into the past. It's sort of like trying to jump when you're in a swimming pool - you can't really jump unless you push yourself from the pool bottom.' Throughout the 'Learning' series, Kang notes that 'people are uncertain about the future and restless when it comes to the past'. The purpose of his work, then, is 'to eliminate both that uncertainty and restlessness'.

In America Landing, Kang's 1997 installation at the Kwangju Biennale, the coloniser and colonised become equals. Posing a statue of General MacArthur at one end of a thirteen-metre long corridor, Kang subverted the statue's imposing manner by using perspective to diminish its virtual size. Viewer and subject observe each other on an equal basis with no pretence of superiority on either side. There is no 'superior' culture, Kang suggests, only different ones.

At the same time, however, Kang insists on the two-way street where Koreans must share their culture with others. 'Flexibility', says Kang, 'has enabled Koreans to survive even amidst the harshest of foreign invasions and has been the source of my own strength'.8) In Kang's work, flexibility is denoted by the artist's facility to traverse and absorb other cultures while maintaining and disseminating his own. Although Kang is classified as an American artist in exhibitions such as 'American Story' at the Setagaya Art Gallery in Tokyo in 1997, solo exhibitions in Seoul, and at international festivals such as the Venice and Kwangju biennales, he is often instantly made a representative of Korea. Yet through his work, Kang embodies the notion of fluidity and, in turn, successfully defies the viscosity of categories and hierarchies that wilfully attempt to constrain the whirl and flux of culture of his infinite and soothingly repetitive squares.

Footnotes

1) Eugenie Tsai, 'Good and Plenty', Ik-Joong Kang, exhibition catalogue, Art Space, Seoul, 1996.

2) Artist's statement, 2 January 1991.

3) Literally, 'book of effort'. This is a colloquialism that refers to blank books used by Korean schoolchildren to commit words or phrases to memory by writing them over and over again.

4) Peter Hyun, Koreana, Korea Britannica, Seoul, 1984, p. 110.

5) The Inchon landing resulted in the retreat of the North Korean People's Army north of the thirty-eighth parallel (the current boundary dividing Korea). On 15 September 1950 United States troops landed at Inchon, almost fifty kilometres from Seoul, behind enemy lines. This move sandwiched a sizeable percentage of the North Korean army and reversed the tide of the war. See David J. Wright, Historical Dictionary of the Korean War, James I. Matray (ed.), Greenwood Press, Westport, 1991, p. 189.

6) Quoted in the Chosun Ilbo, 23 June 1997, p. 10.

7) ibid.

8) ibid.

Research for this article was made possible by the generous support of an East Asia travel grant from Yale University. If not specified otherwise, all quotes and background information are from interviews with the artist on 7 February 1997 in New York City and 22 August 1997 in Seoul, Korea. Images courtesy the artist. Joan Kee received her training in art history at Yale University and writes frequently on contemporary Asian and Asian-American art.

 

 

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The Virginian Pilot The Daily Break, Saturday, December 13, 1997

Worldly Visions

By Teresa Annas

 

 

 

Korean-American artist Ik-Joong Kang is Metaphor Man. One minute, Kang sees himself as bibimbap, a rice-based Korean dish. The next, he is a fortune cookie.

Then he's a kite, his whimsical spirit soaring out and filling as airy gallery in the Contemporary Art Center of Virginia Beech, where earlier this week he was installing a new piece for a show called "Objectivity: International Objects of Subjectivity."

Kang's "English Garden," a 7-foot-tall Buddhist temple with a skin of 350 tape players and 300 tiny paintings, is among the 51 artworks that went on view there Friday.

"Objectivity" is the first original show curated by the center's new officials-executive director Barbara J. Bloemink and curator Carla Hanzal, both of whom have strong credits regarding international contemporary art. It features a dozen sculptors of international stature, nearly all of whom are making their regional debut.

The premise of the show is that no art is truly objective. That, in fact, all art is subjective, in that it reflects the personal life of the artist and his or her cultural context.

Most of the artists are from other countries but live in the United States. The exceptions are Kcho, who cannot get a visa to leave his native Cuba, and Kate Beynon, a Chinese-Australian artist who lives in Australia.

Kcho crafts poignant sculptural installations, incorporating inner tubes and oars, about his fellow Cubans' risky attempts to float away from oppression and poverty.

Beynon challenges the traditions of the Chinese half of her heritage-in particular, the ways Chinese women have been demeaned. Piles of soft-sculpture, distorted bound feet show up in her work.

Also featured is French sculptor Louise Bourgeois, who lives in New York. In her late 80's, she is among the hottest, most influential artists working today. Her work is dark and psychologically penetrating; here she is represented by a menacing 6 foot-diameter bronze spider that is the stuff of nightmares. Brace for screams as visitors round the bend and spy it on the wall.

And there is one area native-Norfolk-reared Walter Martin, now of New York, who creates enigmatic, finely crafted objects that make literary references. He is the only artists in the bunch who has shown locally, having been given a 1993solo show at the Chrysler Museum of Art. Here, he collaborates with his companion, Spanish artisst Paloma Munoz.

The works were still being uncrated and installed as Kang comp;eted his " English Garden." He sppoke as he contemp;ated piles of tape players and a box full of 3-by-3-inch paintings trucked here from his Chinatown studio.

"I think art is about storytelling, about personal storytelling," said Kang who, at 37, already has won a Special Merit Award (at the 1997 Venice Biennale) and has had two shows at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, including one with famed in Korean video artist Nam June Paik.

And if art is a story, he said, "I am the ending, and the beginning."

Kang-rhymes with wan-was raised in Seoul, Korea, and pursue a master's degree in art and an art career. During his first three years in the United Stated, he studied at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn while working two jobs, which left him no time for making art. During the long created hundreds of pocket-size paintings.

For a newcomer, it was a way to process the flood of strange sights he encountered. "My paintings were like taking snapshots," he said.

Even after his career took off and he quit the jobs, he continued to paint small. It became his trademark.

By now, he's made 50,000 3-inch-square paintings and wood blocks. The Whitney owns 6,000. Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art possesses 8,000.

"Instead of confronting a big canvas, I kind of put it in my palm. I don't really have to have a huge idea," he said. " Small idea, put on canvas. It kind of flows, like a stream. It's not like digesting everything. A million ideas, maybe not my ideas. I can just borrow for a moment, chew it and spit it out."

The subject of his art since his arrival in the United States is "learning new culture, new language. It's my personal story of immigrating to a new land."

He sees himself as bibibap, he said, because the dish remains the same, as long as rice is its base. To him, the tiny, square, tile-like modules-sometimes paintings, sometimes blocks of chocolate-are the rice for his bibibap, he said.

Also, he said, "my art is like a fortune cookie. My Chinese friends think this is an American cookies. My American friends think this is Chinese coolie."

"Actually, fortune cookie is from San Francisco" he said, laughing hard at the punch line.

The fortune cookie, like his artwork, is a bridge between two cultures, while belonging wholly to neither one.

Kang's art process is to " bring something from the outskirts of my memory, bring it forward. And then bring something from my fantasy of the future, and then bring it over. And let them collide, head-on crash. And something drops onto canvas."

With "English Garden," the past he brings forward is in the form of temple. Though raised in a Christian family, temples and other manifestations of Buddhism were ever present in his It'ae Won district.

"It's kind of old memory, something frozen. I'm trying to revive it, running something electric through it," he said.

Kang was in the process of connecting each of the tape players that covered the temple. That way, each would broadcast one of two tapes will play a recording of Korean Buddhist monks chanting. A second tape, the will air English-language tapes, the sort Kang listened to for many months after his arrival.

"It's like my brain," he said, holding his hands up high, then wriggling them down an imagined figure. So, "English Garden" is a portrait of Kang-his bipolar brain sending dual signals through his body.

Since Kang has grown accustomed to his new home, and less agog, he looks ore inward than out. " Now, art is a journey of the imagination," he said. "Just fly. My task is exploration."

"I see myself as a kite. As wind blows, I have to make myself lighter and maintain balance. I slowly lift myself up, just let myself totally depend on this wind. Just go with the wind."

When Bloemink started her job at the art center in March, exhibits were scheduled through early December. After that, a gaping hole.

"I wanted to develop a series of shows that, by their subject, taught people what to do with contemporary art," said Bloemink, who has written about and curated shows on contemporary art on a national and international level for 15 years. "That's what this one is a first to do for us here."

The exhibit "Objectivity" begs for visitor participation.

"No objects that you choose to surround yourself with are objective. They all reveal something about you," Bloemink said. "By building a show that asks people to think about the meanings these object brings to mind. And imagining what it reflects about things going on in these countries."

Hanzal, who began as curator July 19, picked up where Bloemink left off, adding more artists to Bloemink's preliminary list. Pulling together such an ambitious show in only four months, borrowing from a wide range of private collectors, top galleries and the artists themselves, was a herculean effort few museums would attempt.

Before coming here, however, Hanzal had worked for seven years at the International Sculpture Center in Washington, D.C., where she was exhibitions director, curator and deputy director. She was accustomed to interacting with the world art community and had widespread contracts within it. Yet, mostly she had been taking American art, including two shows featuring modernist sculptor David Smith, to museums and galleries abroad.

Still, certain objects proved tough to come by. Bloemink really wanted to include one of Bourgeois' celebrated spiders, and Hanzal felt just as strongly.

"That was major research," she said. Hanzal had seen Bourgeois' work in a D.C. gallery, which in turn referred her also said they couldn't help her.

The Robert Miller Gallery in New York was touring a show of her spider pieces. Then, Hanzal found a new gallery in New York's Chelsea neighborhood that out from a London gallery in October and Hanzal nabbed it for the center.

"I don't like to take no for an answer," she said.

 

 

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ART NEWS, March 1997

In the Palm of His Hand

By Carol Lutfy

 

 

 

Ik-Joong Kang believes that like bibibap, a Korean vegetable and rice dish, his art improves with each new element. As if to prove it, he has created over 50,000 works-three-by-three-inch drawings, paintings, woodcuts, and ceramic tiles-since 1984. " My motto," says the 36-year-old Korean-born artist, "is to throw everything together and add."

Kang's is a story of an artist who came to the United States, worked hard, and made good. And from the look of things, 1996 was a banner year. In June, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art bought 8,000 of his diminutive woodcuts. Over the Summer, the Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris in New York hosted 8.490 Ddays of Memory, his site-specific installation made of chocolate. Kang is also at work on a mammoth 12-by-98-foot installation for the international terminal of the San Francisco International Airport, as well as on a subway mural for the New York City Transit Authority. In his homeland, too., recognition is steadily growing: He was recently selected as one of two artists who will represent Korea at the Venice Biennale this year.

Since moving from Seoul to New York 13 years ago, Kang has reinvented himself as a philosopher-artist in the spirit of his hero and compatriot Nam June Paik. His experience as an immigrant to the United States forms the basis not only for his work but also for the folksy parables and metaphors in which he speaks: America as the unattainable major leagues; art as spaghetti or bibibap; cultural assimilation as the transformation of an octagon into a circle.

The impetus behind his three-by-three-inch format is also a part of this mythology in the palm of his hand when he was still a struggling art student. During his long subway commutes between school and his jobs at a Korean grocery and a Queens flea market, he recorded his unfamiliar surroundings, making pictures of tokens and teacups, faces and fir trees, body builders and buildings. " The paintings were a tool for keeping my memory fresh. I thought that if I could just store the images like documents, I could repaint them at a later date," Kang recalls.

Somewhere along the way, however, he realized that his stockpile of canvases constituted works in their own right. And indeed, the paintings are remarkable for their sincerity, conspicuous absence of self-consciousness, and sheer diversity and volume. In some, Kang employs found objects, like buttons, hardware, rubber stamps, tassels, and wooden pegs. In others, he depicts himself as a forlorn, cartoonlike subject. Some are intricate studies, other doodles. "They are a diary of my transition between two cultures," he explains.

Kang's work has evolved consistently since he began working in miniature as a student. He did his first "painting performance" at Two Two Raw Gallery in New York in 1990, painting 1,000 canvases in a month. In 1990 he introduced the ides of sound to his paintings by embedding tiny speakers in their backs. He initiated a series of woodcuts in 1991, which, like the paintings, echo the ephemera of everyday life. Then in 1992 his interest shifted to "English learning drawings"-over 1,000 laminated pages crammed with comic poignancy his painstaking efforts to master a second tongue.

More recently, the subject matter of his work has reached back to his childhood. For example, 8,490Days of Memory evoked bittersweet memories with a nine-foot-tall, chocolate-coated sculpture of General Douglas MacArthur. Lining foil-covered walls were 8,490 three-three-inch squares of chocolate(one for every day he lived in Korea), each depicting a rank emblem of a U.S. army officer. For Kang, chocolate conjures up fond memories of a child's treat as much as resentment toward the U.S. army bases in Korea. The sickly sweet smell of the installation pointedly conveyed the duality of these feelings.

Despite advances in his career, Kang has kept his distance from the art world. A round-faced, bespectacled man, he is by his own account "an artist who looks like an accountant." He currently has no gallery and says he doesn't want one. "I want to make what I want to make," he says. "It's too early for selling."

His modesty is perhaps tied to his respect for Nam June Paik and to his realization to follow. "In 12th-century Korea, there was an army general who planted a sa=mall corn stalk and jumped over it every day. In that way, even when it grew to be eight feet tall, he could still jump over it," Kang says.

"Nam June is like the corn plant. People cannot jump over him right now. But I am two feet tall, so they can jump over me. That's my role: to enable the next generation of Korean artists to jump over him."

 

 

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