Ik-Joong Kang

A.MAGAZINE, 1996

Home Sweet Hamage

By Kay Kamiyama

 

 

 

As a schoolchild in Korea, artist Ik-joong Kang's first contact with America came in the form of a chocolate bar: In post-war Korea, American G.I.'s would throw the tasty treats to him and other schoolmates as they walked home from class. "It has a lot of symbolism," Kang recalls with irony. "When missionaries came to Korea, they had a bible in one hand and food in the other."

Until now, Kang has relied on painting to communicate his experiences. But for his installation, "8490 Days of Memory." He wanted to revisit childhood memories of Western popular culture while casting an ironic gaze on the U.S.'s pervasive influences. It seemed to call for an entirely different medium, and for Kang, chocolate fit the bill.

In the installation, which opened at the Philip Morris branch of the Whitney Museum in New York on July 111th, thousands of titles of chocolate- 8490 to be exact-entirely cover the walls of one room. In the center of it, atop a pedestal of 8490 clear plastic tubes, an imposing, nine-foot statue of General Douglas MacArthur reigns. Its military might and mass marketing, arrayed in mythic proportions in one sweet-smelling room.

"Chocolate is priced like a painting," Kang explains, "It has nothing to do with the ingredients, how much money or material was spent making it. It's more about national pride an d reputation." It's for that reason, Kang argues, that "Korean chocolate can never invade the American market," But in 8490 Days," the chocolate tables are already turned: Kang's exhibition-quality chocolate, he confesses, was made in Korea.

 

 

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The New York Times,  Sunday, September 18, 1994

From Korea, the Makings of a Dialogue With a New Homeland

By Vivien Raynor

 

 

 

The Whitney Museum of American Art at Champion in Stamford is busy with small images that from a distance could easily be mistaken for tiles on a mosque.  Upon entering, visitors pass through a prescenium packed floor to ceiling with the canvases of Ik-Joong Knag, each of which measures three inches square.  Beyong, they see similarly covered walls acting as backdrops for a few assemblages by Nam June Paik.  But the largest of these stands in a corner alone, a 15-foot-high pyramid of television monitors playing the same videotape, but not in unison.

The show pays tribute to the multiplicity of everything in the United States and in so doing it illuminates the contribution made to 20th-century are by artists born in Korea.  Officially, this contribution began in the late 1950’s, when Mr. Paik, a musician and composer just graduated from the University of Tokyo, went to work in Germany with the master of sonic experiment, Kariheinz Stockhausen.

While in Germany Mr. Paik staged an homage to John Cage and, not long after, performed “Etude for Pianoforte” before an audience that included Mr. Cage.  Without warning, Mr. Paik took a pair of scissors to the American composer’s shirt and tie.  Oedipal as it may seem, the gesture proved that besides being the most sincere form of flattery, imitation is an excellent way of attracting attention.

A few years later and, again in Germany, came the artist’s first exhibition of objects - television beaming scrambled images and pianos that had been altered.  The kicker on this occasion was Joseph Beuys assaulting one of the pianos with an ax.  Small wonder Mr. Paik merged with the Fluxus rebellion, an updated version of Dada and a precursor of Performance art.

After moving Manhattan in 1964, Mr. Paik branched out into video; in 1965 he taped Pope John 6’s visit to New York and showed the result two hours later at the Café a Go-Go.

The rawness associated with spectacles he once engineered has departed from his work, thanks to technological progress and, in particular, to the synthesizer developed by Mr. Paik reigns as the electronic master, producing imagery that is corporate smooth.

The shapes in the Whitney pyramid, a 1982 work titled “V-yramid,” throb and repeat themselves to a virtually inaudible sound track.  The shapes are brightly colored abstractions with figural illusions and for a while the eye tries to make sense of them, only to give up and go with the uninflected flow, as with normal television.

In the show’s catalogue, Eugenie Tsai (the show’s curator as well as the director of the branch museum), describes the exhibition as a dialogue “between life and art, different artistic traditions and different generations.”

Indeed, the gap between the two performers seems unbridgeable, but, soon enough, affinities begin to emerge.  Mr. Paik may be a latter-day Duchamp to Western sensibilities, but the émigré characteristics so obvious in Mr. Kang’s work can still be detected in Mr. Paik’s.  One is an elliptical sense of humor.  Ms. Tsai observed that “While Cage brought a Wester’s eye to a sustained interest in the East, Paik has done just the opposite.”

Mr. Paik does it most effectively by placing a wax approximation ofBuddha in fron of a small television all but buried in earth.  Behind stands a camera recording the scene, which can include the viewer.  There is humor enough in the idea of Buddha contemplating a television screen with the same detachment that he brings to the cosmos.

But the idea acquires an edge when one realizes that the philosopher’s stare is no less glassy than that of a family watching, say, “Married With Children.”

As everyone knows, sights and customs that go unnoticed by the natives of a country are lodes of profundity - or absurdity, as the case may be - for immigrants.

Although Mr. Kang, now 34, is one of several Korean artists mining these lobes, he does it in a stream-of-consciousness way that passes for innocence but is firmly based on his studies of traditional painting in Seoul and of the Western variety at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.

Ms. Tsai points out that the three-inch square has a special significance in Asian cultures, being, among other things, the perfect size in Zen thought.  But she goes on to explain that the format was just right for an artist obliged to support himself in two jobs, one in Manhattan, the other in Far Rockaway, Queens, since it enabled him to work while traveling on the subway.

Everything is subject matter for Mr. Kang.  In one picture, he portrays two profiles, the first captioned “Gallery Artist,” the second, slightly larger, “Artist.”  Underneath a picture of a hand grenade he writes “Chicago/ Was/ Very Cold.”  He flips from international politics to cocaine and sex.

Finally, there are the pairs of handwritten words - usually a noun modified by an adjective - that occupy the wide borders on the drawings.  “Rational concept,” “singular judgment” and “added significance” are some examples.  Behind the wall of pictures titled “Buddha Learning English,” the artist himself can be heard on tape practicing such combinations until he goes them right.

In a catalogue essay, the painter Byron Kim remarks that “for Paik and Kang nothing is too small to be elevated and celebrated.”  Ms. Tsai quotes Mr. Kang likening his output and that of his mentor to bibimap, a Korean dish that requires the cook to “throw everything together and add.” (The phrase is also the title an installation shown in a full-page color illustration in the show’s catalogue.)  The question is whether either artist would have scaled the heights of obsession is he had remained at home.

It is a beautiful show but prospective viewers are advised to take it in small doses, with plenty of rest in between.  The show remains through Sept. 28.

 

 

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The advocate and Greenwich Time,  Sunday, August 21, 1994

Whitney’s art “happening”

By Carolee Ross

 

 

 

It’s an actual art happening, full of visual stimuli and excitement, just like those former Metropolitan Museum Director Tom Hoving produced during the 60s and 70s.  But this one is better because it’s right in our backyard.

This opening takes place at the Whitney Museum of American Art at Champion in downtown Stamford.  It’s called “Multiple/Dialogue,” featuring the works of Korean-born artists Nam June Paik (b. 1932) and Ik-Joong Kang (b.1960), several generations apart-but their mindset and approach to the visual world seems incredibly close.

Buses from New York cruise up to the Whitney entrance, releasing throngs of eager art lovers.  Inside the lobby of the Champion building, musicians in authentic Korean costume play ancient instruments, welcoming visitors to the celebration.  The “Who’s who” in Korean-American society arrives in evening attire, proud to be a part of the evening’s festivities.

Fairfield County has finally made it to the Big Art World.  With the arrival of Eugenie Tsai, new Director of the Branch of the Whitney Museum of Art at Stamford, and curator of this exhibition, viewers are coming to our neck is more than the posh galleries of the isle of Manhattan.

There’s an exciting energy here, filling the walls, bombarding our sense with imagery, saturating our eyes with color.  If we get close enough to the entrance walls, we can hear tiny voices whispering through the artworks.  When we go into the main room, "Devil in a Blue Dress," blares from multiple rows of stacked TV screens, filling our senses with sight and sound.  ‘Multiple, multiple, multiple’ is not an understated theme, but seems to scream across the surface of both artists’ work, while underneath, the geometric format of the grid holds it all together.

It is the shorthand staccato sightplay of two journalistic composers, expressing the rhythms of American civilization.  The work of both artists examines all the categories of the world, not for its immediate appearances, but for immediate appearances, but for its physical energies, for its performance.

Movement becomes material, the space in which movement occurs becomes as important as mass, the immediate effects of sound, light and color on the senses offers a more direct road to the spectator than do recollections of previous experience, allusions to myths and legends, or symbolic constructs.  Writes essayist Byron Kim in the exhibit’s catalogue, “Both Paik and Kang deal in the metaphysics of the mundane.”

The artists are both here, being interviewed for Korean television in front of Paik’s work.  “Cage in Cage,”  The work is a homage to the avant-garde composer who provided the stimulus for Paik’s venture into fine arts.  As curator Tsai informs us in her catalogue essay, Korean-born Paik began his career as a musician and composer, graduating from the University of Tokyo with a thesis on composer Arnold Schonberg.  Paik met John Cage in Germany and in 1959, gave a performance titled "Hommage a John Cage: Music for Tape Recorder and Piano” in 1959.  The following year.  Paik, who describes himself as a “Mongolian-Manchurian-Korean nomad,” jumped off the stage during a performance of Etude for Pianoforte and cut attendee Cage’s shirt and tie with a scissors.  Ultimately, he began to produce objects only after associating with the group Fluxus,  “a loose, anarchic association of artists who, in actions, exhibitions, compositions and manifestoes, created a rebellious alliance against perceived institutions and trends in high culture.”

Paik began experimenting with video as early as 1964, filming Pope Paul VI’s visit to New York and later showing it at the most diametrically opposed of places, Café a Go-Go.

His technique gradually became more refined, and with the aid of synthesizers developed by himself and engineer Shuya Abe, he was able to program a number of television monitors into the same installation.

Viewers stand fascinated in front of Paik’s installation.  “V-yramid,” while the multiple screens, arranged in the manner of an ancient pyramid-turned-ziggurat, display constantly changing images and montages of actual television programming.  Tsai’s analogy to the ethos of the sixties, “which advocated the effacement of the artist through the use of industrial materials and fabrication,” can be easily understood in relationship to the work.

Paik eventually passes out on a comfortable chair in the lobby from jet-lag exhaustion, but artist Kang, who is also celebrating his thirty-fourth birthday, shares some of his philosophical views about his 3 x 3 inch square works Their size can perhaps be compared to a stenographer’s shorthand pad, allowing the artist to record his continuous impressions of his adopted country.

A two - part, Thursday evening lecture series sponsored by the Whitney begins Sept. 8, with Curators’ Dialogue, when John Hanhardt, curator, film and video and Eugenie Tsai, branch director address the art and careers of Nam June Paik and Ik-Joong Kang.  On Thursday, Sept. 22, Ik-Joong Kang will appear to discuss his art, the exhibition and cultural issues.  All presentations begin at 6 P.M>

 

 

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Space Magazine(Korea),  1994

Multiple / Dialogue: Paik, Nam-June and Kang, Ik-Joong

(Whitney Museum of American Art at Champion, 7. 22 - 9.28, 1994)

By Jeong Lee Sanders-

 

 

 

Multiple/ Dialogue: Paik, Nam-Jun and Kang, Ik-Joong is the title of a new exhibition on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art at Champion in Stanford, Connecticut, from July 22 to September 28, 1994 and features three multimedia installations by Paik, Nam-Jun and four installations consisting of 25,000 paintings, woodcuts, and drawings by Kang, Ik-Joong.

The summer exhibition features the two Korean-born artists of different generations and draws on their similarities.  Paik, born in 1932, is an established international figure who resides in New York City and is renowned as the father of video art.  While Kang, born in 1960, is at the start of his career and is becoming known for his work which consists of thousands of 3” x 3” paintings, woodcuts and drawings chronicling his life in New York.  Despite the obvious fact that both artists are Korean-born and pursuing careers abroad, the Whitney Museum’s choice to exhibit the work of these two artists from different generations, each using different media is significant.  “The pairing was not made on the basis of media, but on shared themes and systems of organization.  American popular culture, the stuff of daily life, holds Paik and Kang in thrall, and appears as image, artifact, and sound in their respective work.”

After Kang graduated from Hong-Ik University in Seoul in1984 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, he enrolled at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, and graduated in 1987 with a Masters of Fine Arts degree.  Since then Kang has lived and worked in New York city.  It is said that Kang began to use the 3” square format during his days as a student, so he could work while on the move in the city - the paintings could easily fit in his pocket as well as in the palm of his hand.

Of Kang’s four installations exhibited at Multiple/ Duakigye, his first piece [Untitled 1984-1994] represents a decade of Kang’s work of mixed media on 3” x 3” canvases (some of which serve as speaker covers) all created since his arrival in the United States.  Many of the images depicted are figurative-a simple image of a Korean grocery (the king Kang spent long hours working in when he first arrived in New York), a detailed rendering of a muscle man, and watercolor impressions of Susan and others; while other images are nonfigurative- a presentation of several geometric shapes or a colorful painting of an abstract atmospheric jumble.  Some canvases just have a single found object glued to the surface-a cup, a jar, a plastic child’s shoe, and a rubber stamp; while others have just a few hand printed words-“I saw Spike Lee” or a pasted newspaper ad text for “Baby Wipe.”  The paintings are worked with a light touch and give the impression of merely recording the essence of experiences or images, rather than highly labored objects of art.  However, the impressive visual impact of the work is largely a result of their awesome presentation - being grouped together by the thousands in an immense and seemingly endless grid format.

In 1990, for a similar installation entitled The sound paintings, Kand installed small speakers in the back of 2,000 of the 7,000 paintings shown.  Sounds from nature emitted from the paintings alluded to elements of Korean landscape painting: water (using the sound of the ocean); mountains (using the sound of birds); clouds(using the sound of a thunderstorm); and trees (using the sound of the wind).  Kang continues to incorporate the element of sound in his installations and in this exhibition has included an audio recording of his own voice reciting phrases in English taken from various magazines, newspapers and books.

In addition to the works on canvas, Kang exhibits his woodcuts created in the same 3” square format.  The subject matter for these works is also taken from Kang’s daily experiences in New York.  But these element take on a new more steadfast presence as they are moments captured in wood which undoubtedly is a more demanding and time consuming process.

Paik, Nam-Jun’s three installations from the 1980’s and 1990’s but refer to his entire career.  V-Pyramid (1982) is a stack of forty televisions on top of one another.  The two stacks are stepped on one side and sheer on the other.  They are placed at right angles to form a corner, or V-shape, such that the top of the pyramid and the point of the “V” coincide.  The viewer faces the interior of the “V” and all forty television screens face the viewer.  The kaleidoscopic imagery changes rapidly in response to a musical soundtrack of rock and roll and traditional Korean music.

In Cage in cage (1993), made the year after the death of composer John Cage, Paik pays final tribute to Cage, Nine video monitors confined in a large multi-storied birdcage display footage of Cage using rapidly changing images-some smiling while others gradually dissolve into and out of Buddha.

By pairing Paik and Kang together, the exhibition draws more on their formal concerns-the use of the multiple or module as and organizational device.  Though these artists may be of different artistic traditions and of different generations, their distinctive methods in capturing and commenting on contemporary life are in other ways quite similar.  

 

 

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San Francisco Examiner, Wednesday, Feburary 2, 1994

Remarkable Opening for Capp Street

By David Bonetti

 

 

 

Capp street Project, the alternative space that offers artists three month-long residencies, has moved.  Founded in 1983 in David Ireland’s 65 Capp St. corrugated metal house, it moved in 1989 into a former automobile detailing facility around the corner on 14th Street.  Now, in quest of a good caffe latte, it has moved to 525 Second St. near South Park, the “nice” neighborhood where architects and designers hang out in trendy California-style trattorie.

Although located in a neighborhood bourgeois art patrons found less than nice, Capp Street’s former digs were extraordinary.  A large, low space with a wide wraparound balcony, it was reminiscent of an early Christian basilia, and it offered some artists the opportunity of a lifetime.  Ursula von Rydingsvard, George Stone, Carl Cheng and Francesc Torres, among others produced unforgettable installations there.  But for other artists, the space was too extraordinary - they were overwhelmed by it and their work showed it.

Giving up its former space is an architectural loss.  The new space is smaller and less extraordinary, but probably more practical.  Designed by Bay Area architect Stanley Saltowltx, the 8,00-square-foot area is divided into three large spaces on two floors, none of which is grand enough to intimidate.  It will allow Capp Street greater flexibility.  Now, it can feature three artists simultaneously, and it won’t have to close, as it sometimes did for lengthy periods, when time-consuming work is being constructed.

Saitowits, who is best know for designing private houses in the opne landscape, has minimally refurbished the old brick warehouse building, bringing it up to seismic standards, and creating usable and flexible spaces.  His single grand statement is an open, steel-meshclad staircase that rises from the middle of the first floor.  It is a wonderful gesture.  

The grand opening exhibitions, which continue through March 19, feature three artists.  Korean-born New York City resident Ik-Joong Kang steals the show.  In “Throw Everything Together and Add,” he has done just that.  Filling the first space you enter directly from the street, it is composed of 15,000 small paintings, drawings and wood-blocks, rising in a grid from floor to ceiling on a temporary triangular structure.

There’s a story to the work’s genesis.  Kang recounts that when he first moved to New York in 1984, he had a two-hour subway commute.  Now waiting to lose that amount of art-making time, he devised a format of 3-inch-squre canvases that fit in the palm of his hand that he could work on while riding the trains.  In 10 years, he has made nearly 25,000 works.  Capp Street states that he has made more paintings than any other artists in history - an improvable claim, but one I am willing to accept.  

Kang used his art as a tool to help him learn a new language and assimilate into a new culture.  His voracious work is a record of virtually every word, every phrase, every image, every sign that passed through his consciousness.  It is classic New York immigrant art, and, in its different way - it is a product of the conceptual ‘80s and ‘90s - it joins with work by earlier generations of artists such as Arshile Gorky, Joseph Stella and Raphael and Moses Soyer to tell the story of the immigrant experience in New York City.

Kang Does not exhibit a style of his own, but he serves as a medium for the styles of representation that reached his consciousness.  Not surprisingly, given the time and place, the dominant style is pop.  His work is filled with phrases and images borrowed directly from American, specifically New York, popular culture.  Vulgar, crude, visually and verbally cacophonic, ugly at times, mean but also funny and surprisingly generous and loving, it posses an unstoppable dynamism.  If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere, and through a remarkable exercise in productivity, Kang has infiltrated its significant list of makers.

Bay Area artist Mildred Howard shares the ground floor.  In “Last Train: From Caney Creek to 16th and Wood,” Howard continues to address the historic migration of Southern blacks to Northern cities in search of a better life.  Expanding her ideas to real scale, however, she becomes too literal for the good of her art.

Howard has laid a real train track through the gallery, a life-sized metaphor for the diasporas that could stand equally well for any number of migrations.  Making it specific with the blown-up images of a woman posing for the camera with her son, Howard only reminds you of the delicate poetry of her smaller scale work.  A life-sized chicken coop with three live chickens and a cart laden with box lunches of fried chicken and pound cake (which the artist distributed at the crowded opening) also fail to make vivid in the way her more modestly scaled work does the trauma, the hopes, the implicit disappointments of the great migration north, in this case, to Oakland.  

New York object-maker Donald Lipski has made an installation titled “The Starry Night” that uses 25,000 double-edged razor blades.  Based on the kinds of patterns Vincent van Gogh painted in his famous picture, Lipski arranged the razor blades in waves of energy spreading across three walls of the large upstairs gallery.  From a distance, the blades merge in one’s vision to serve as a three-dimensional line that also casts its own shadow upon the wall.

Like his better-know work that juxtaposes found objects in unlikely combinations, “The Starry Night” jolts one’s perception.  However, spreading across surfaces that are interrupted by a brick window-wall and a staircase that emerges from below, the installation’s energy dissipates as a totality.  The best time to have seen it was at the opening, when hundreds of opening-nighters helped create a sense of danger as they pressed close to the exposed blades.

 

 

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