CATALOGUE ESSAYS

Po Kim: Darkness and Arcadia

in Po Kim: Then and Now, Whanki Museum, Seoul, South Korea, 2017

by Raphael Rubinstein

The life and career of every noteworthy artist presents us with all kinds of questions, and the more substantial the achievement, the more we feel compelled seek out answers. Over time, many methods, from formalism to psychoanalysis, have been developed to provide the kind of full and deep understanding that seems to reside in great paintings and sculptures (or any other medium), or in the interstices between the oeuvre and the life, tantalizingly hidden away, camouflaged, immanent. Given our hunger for comprehension, it’s tempting to search for the single key that will unlock all the mysteries of an artist’s work, whatever our methodology. Far better, however, is to recognize that no single experience or conviction or condition governs the creative process, which is as shifting and contingent as any other aspect of existence. So while we must continue to identify the important questions that art imposes on us, we shouldn’t believe that any single one of them provides any kind of total revelation.

If I begin this essay on the work of Po Kim by considering what it means to define an artist’s work in relation to questions, it is because, for me, the long trajectory of Kim’s career, which began in the late 1930s when he was studying art in Japan and spanned many decades in New York, up until his death in 2014, orbits around two fundamental and difficult questions. First, what is the relationship between the wartime traumas that Kim suffered in Japan and Korea in the 1940s and early 1950s and the art that he made after his immigration to the United States in 1955? Secondly, why did Kim work in three distinct modes during his life (gestural abstraction in the 1950s and 1960s, realist still-lifes in the 1970s, and symbolist figuration from the 1980s until the end of his life)? It’s important to note at the outset how this pluralist approach to style was atypical for an artist of his generation; it’s one of the things that gives Po Kim current relevance. His willingness, indeed, the deep necessity he seems to have felt, to radically transform his work, to repeatedly change styles, is at odds with the mainstream modernism that dominated much of the 20^th century. In this, Po Kim is in the company of modern art’s stylistic heretics such as Francis Picabia and Philip Guston, as well as with countless contemporary artists who, free of doctrinaire aesthetics, easily migrate across styles and mediums. 

To approach the first of my questions, we must focus on Kim’s experiences during the Second World War (which he spent in Japan, where he had gone to study art in 1937) and in Korea before and during the Korean War. In a fascinating, and often harrowing, oral history interview conducted by Hae-kyeong Ki in 2006-2007, Kim recalls what it was like to live through the firebombing of Tokyo in 1943, in particular the March 10^th attack that killed over 100,000 people in a single night. “The air raids back then were terrible—every night. We couldn’t sleep. The planes would come at around midnight. . . .  On March 10^th they [the U.S. Army Air Force] completely firebombed Asakusa [an entertainment district in Tokyo]. . . . In the morning I went out and saw the dead bodies. . . those who’d been hiding in dugouts had been roasted in the heat. A mother and child were fused together. They were trying to get them out, but the flesh was burnt—if you held the skin it would fall off. After seeing that scorched woman…whenever I see something burned, I mistake it for a burned human being.” During the war, Kim was constantly on the run from the Japanese authorities that wanted to draft him as a “student soldier” or send him to work mining coal, which was nearly as dangerous as combat. “The safety systems in Japanese mines were horrible at the time, resulting in numerous casualties,” Kim told Hae kyeong-Ki, “and if any of the miners were making trouble, they’d simply go in when he was working and kill him with a shovel.”

Having survived the Second World War, thanks to equal part luck and an instinct for survival, Kim returned to Korea in 1945 and, the following year, at the age of 28, joined the faculty of Chosun University’s new fine art department. Alas, his troubles were far from over.  In 1948, he was arrested by the Korean police on false accusations of subversion and tortured by electric shocks. In 1950, following the invasion by North Korea, he was again falsely arrested. Not long afterwards, finding himself in a town that had been captured by the North Korean army, he was yet again arrested and tortured, this time by the other side. After the area was recaptured by the South, he was sent to the front lines as a “war artist.” Given these experiences, its not surprising that, in 1955, Kim eagerly immigrated to the United States where, despite years of hardship and poverty, he never considered returning to his native land. As he explained to Hae-kyeong Ki: “I didn’t want to go back. I was tired of Korea, and scared… I had lost all affection for my country. Like I said, I was terrified just by the sight of a cop. . . . I never had a peaceful mind when I was in Korea. I know I had a morbid fear for my life, because I’d almost died several times.”

What is striking in surveying Kim’s oeuvre with these traumatic incidents, this decade of fear, in mind is how little trace there seems to be in his art of the violence and political oppression that marked his life until his late 30s. It is as if, in leaving Korea, he decided to devote himself to the pursuit of the artistic freedom that was lacking, as if he refused to be haunted by his terrible experiences, refused to let  darkness determine the spirit or the content of his work.

It could be argued, of course, that the gestural abstraction he practiced contained, in its nervous energy, in its “existential” reevaluation of painting and its openness to intuition and improvisation, a response to the turmoil of the mid-20^th century. Certainly, what Abstract Expressionists such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko were doing in the late 1940s was deeply affected by the horrors of the Second World War. By the late 1950s, however, despite the pervasive dread of the Cold War, which could be felt even in the lofts and bars of Downtown Manhattan which Kim frequented, gestural abstraction had become something more concerned with a kind of painterly lyricism, with the play of light and movement, with improvised rhythms. It is this mode of abstraction, generally associated with the “Second Generation” Ab-Ex painters, that Kim’s work partakes of so beautifully, with its skittering marks, blurred gestures and artful sfumato effects. His 1957-1965 paintings revel in wet-into-wet brushstrokes pushing into one another with urgent energy and localized explosions of color. Drawing with the brush, often in somber compositions relying on the darkest of grays, greens and blues, he produced work that expanded the emotional and painterly range of abstraction. Kim’s work of the time had clear affinities with what other young New York artists were doing, at the time, painters such as Norman Bluhm, Pat Passloff, Milton Resnick and Alfred Leslie. Like many a survivor, Kim, I suspect, wanted to live for the present, and imagine a future, rather than be dragged down by a dark past.

At least in part, Kim’s changing economic status affected his work of the 1950s and 1960s. In the first phase of his U.S. work, done when he was a fellow at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, he painted on canvas or linen, but after his move to New York City in 1957, his circumstances became increasingly difficult, as he supported himself with poorly paid temporary employment. By 1960, no longer able to afford canvas, he was painting almost exclusively on paper. Although invariably painted in oils, these works on paper frequently evoke the effects of ink drawings. Here, Kim began to reach back to his Korean roots. With fewer gestures than the paintings, and more open space around them, he was able to engage with traditional Korean calligraphic painting. His calligraphic works rely on brushstrokes that abruptly change direction, sometimes several times in a single gesture and the dynamic interplay between shape and mark.  It was at this time that Kim emerged publically in New York with his first solo exhibition, at Kornblee Gallery in 1962. Interestingly, the first show at Kornblee that year was “Poem Painting”, which included collaborative work by Grace Hartigan and Larry Rivers and poets such as Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler and Barbara Guest.  In his introduction to the show, which was printed on the exhibition announcement, Schuyler cites the important precedent of Chinese calligraphy in the marriage of image and word. Kim’s oil-on-paper work of circa 1962 exemplify the notion so important to New York School poets and painters of the spontaneous gesture that catches both creator and viewer/reader by surprise, and he was, of course, deeply affected by the same East Asian poem-painting calligraphic traditions that influenced the New York School. 

At the same time, it is important to recognize how, because of its grounding in Asian calligraphy, Kim’s early work departs from New York School gestural painting.  In a book published in conjunction with “Asian Tradition/Modern Expression,” a 1997 exhibition at the Zimmerli Art Museum that included Po Kim’s work, Jeffrey Wechsler notes how, in contrast to the work of Franz Kline, whose paintings were often discussed in relation to Asian art, Kim’s “calligraphic abstractions reflect the uncorrected, single-go Eastern method, its elegantly developed linear gestures and, more importantly, its concern for open space.” As Weschsler points out, Kline’s reliance on studies and shapes made from accumulated marks left no possibility of the Taoist “ch’i” in which breath, spirit and movement of the brush come together in holistic immediacy. For Po Kim, Kline’s work exhibited “a very poor brushwork” and “had no life in it,” though he later came to see that the American painter’s work was essentially pictorial and not calligraphic.

As anyone familiar with Kim’s career knows, around 1971 he abruptly changed his work in the most extreme manner. Since the mid-1960s his life had seen significant changes, including a move to Paris in 1966 (that turned out to be short-lived when he was disappointed by the French art scene) and, more importantly, his meeting and marriage to artist Sylvia Wald in 1968. Feeling that he had, in his own words, “reached a dead end of a long road” with abstraction, Kim began making incredibly realistic colored-pencil drawings of fruits and vegetables. Working on small sheets of white paper (generally around 12 by 20 inches), Kim depicted broccoli, mangoes, asparagus, onions, peaches, walnuts, and pears, supplementing this vegetarian art diet on a few occasions with fish. In contrast to conventional still-lifes where the subjects are carefully arranged, Kim captured his produce items in seemingly casual arrays, as if they had just tumbled out of a shopping bag. He also gives only the merest hint of location with just a touch of shadow. It was only toward the end of the decade that his compositions become more elaborate, sometimes incorporating elements of collage, which can include fragments of his own early calligraphic drawings glued down next to precisely rendered walnuts.

In 1981, exactly ten years after his shift from gestural abstraction to veristic drawing, Kim again broke with his own precedent, and once again did so apparently without any transitional period. The new style that emerges at the start of the 1980s and that would continue to engage Kim’s energies until the end of his life focuses on the only two major modes of painting that he had yet to explore: figuration and landscape. (It wasn’t only the iconography that changed for Kim in the 1980s, he also shifted from oil to acrylic paint and, by his own account, began his large-scale painting without any plan.) One might think that after a decade of drawing realist still-lifes, Kim would approach the human figure and the natural world with the same attention to accurate observation and tiny detail. Instead, in a turn that was typical of an artist who seems never to have been afraid of change, Kim looked back to Matisse and Fauvism to create a world of highly simplified figures placed within zones of pure color decorated with simply drawn plant forms and loosely executed patterns. Male and female figures, often little more than silhouettes with the merest of facial features and sexual characteristics (genitalia, breasts), share the canvases, which become increasingly large in scale, with quickly sketched animals (fish, elephants, birds of various types). This new openness resulted in epically-scaled  multi-figure extravaganzas such as Family (1989-90) and Before the Wake (1994-95) as well as in many smaller paintings such as Table (1986-88) and Fortunetelling A (1995) populated with elemental and pictographic imagery. While clearly indebted to Matisse and aspects of Picasso, these paintings also have strong affinities with a generation of Neo-Expressionist painters who began showing their work widely in the early 1980s, an international cohort of artists who included Francesco Clemente, Nicola de Maria and Julian Schnabel. But Kim’s figurative style also looked back to the heritage of Symbolist art from Gauguin to Edvard Munch to the postwar New York painter Jan Müller. Never allowing himself to be corralled by style, Kim didn’t hesitate to make abstract paintings within his ostensibly figurative period, as we can see with Blue Wind B (2010) and A Beginning for the Year (2010), canvases that employ the big loose brushstrokes of the figurative work for looping calligraphic lines. 

There was still one more unexpected innovation in store. Around 2007, when he turned 80, Kim began using colored tape in his large paintings, freely mixing imagery done by paintbrush with figures and shapes designated by segments of colored tape. To my eye the most impressive of these colored-tape paintings are those done on white grounds where the artist also includes colored paper into the mix. They have the joyful spirit of Matisse’s Arcadian fantasies, offering a vision of earthly paradise that couldn’t be more removed from the dark times that Kim experienced in the 1940s and 1950s. The artist himself was keenly aware of the stark contrast: “Long ago, my life was not very peaceful. So I wanted to forget the pain, and only paint fantasies, things of beauty, things that were devoid of suffering.”

And yet, there is a restlessness to Kim’s entire career that suggests he may not have completely forgotten the pain of his youth, nor the unsettling effects of exile. Could it be that Kim’s dramatic shifts in style and subject matter were not only a matter of his desire for artistic challenges, or his response to the evolution of contemporary art? Could it be that his self-transformation from gestural abstractionist to still-life realist to figurative symbolist—three distinct modes each of which he excelled in—was motivated by his knowledge that as powerful as art might be, as much as he loved it, as much solace as it gave him, he knew that the forces of fear and violence and terror remained as prevalent as ever. Kim was, it seems to me, one of those artists who make the greatest of demands of art, who want it to be able to save not only the artist but the entire world. Impossible demands, but ones that Kim could never cease making until the end of his life, like a scientist relentlessly searching for a cure to a deadly disease, experimenting with a hope of that discovery that never dies.