Welcome to One Superb Present, the place Observer highlights a lately opened exhibition at a museum not in New York Metropolis, a spot we all know and love that already receives loads of consideration.
Nature portray is a tough proposition within the fashionable period. In earlier occasions, a panorama supplied viewers the chance to see someplace they’d by no means been, or a meaty and romantic metaphor for the human situation. Nowadays, our existential questions are typically expressed via the matters of know-how and consumerism. The painter of nature competes with airfare, the plush otherworldly landscapes discovered inside digital worlds and David Attenborough.
However painter Kim Chong Hak (b. 1937) has managed to seize the eye of the ever-online millennials and Gen Z in South Korea. A brand new present on the Excessive Museum of Artwork, “Kim Chong Hak, Painter of Seoraksan,” goals to introduce his work to American audiences, with a primary exhibition on this nation that takes its identify from the mountain in his personal that’s his frequent topic, the tallest within the Taebaek mountain vary. Kim moved to Gangwon Province, which seems to be onto these peaks, within the late Nineteen Seventies and in them discovered a universe that continues to encourage him at present.
His topics could also be traditional, however Kim makes use of a contemporary vernacular. American audiences could also be simply discovering Kim, nevertheless it’s clear that he’s stored up with Western developments in portray. No. 13 (2006) presents a mountain slope with a substantial amount of persona and method. Every aircraft of lengthy oil work might have been made by a distinct artist, with the sky wisping Impressionistically, and the chunky darkish mountain crags wanting extra like Mark Rothko. What makes the work are the stems of vegetation that lend it the aforementioned character. This panorama could be desolate with out them. As a substitute, it strives. The farther ones are rendered as defiant scoring whereas the foreground ones bloom out of the snow in pink and inexperienced, which one way or the other doesn’t really feel unusual in any respect.
It’s clear that botany is a topic that he’s studied as a lot as artwork historical past. One in all his newer works, Untitled (Panorama Collection) (2021), is a lush jungle that demonstrates not solely his range of portray types but additionally his information of species. You possibly can’t invent that many alternative sorts of flowers, bushes and leaves. It’s a kind of work that sucks you in and surrounds you, a knotty mess of inexperienced so thick that it nearly makes your eyes cross.
Let’s throw one other affect into the combo: Korean craft traditions. His intricate flowers are so detailed and vivid that simply considered one of them might beautify a family object, and certainly, such objects have been an inspiration to him. Proven alongside his artwork on this present are a collection of design objects from his assortment. His flowers do certainly resemble the rainbow ones on considered one of his bojagi, also referred to as wrapping cloths. These could be wrapped round a pair of carved geese introduced to a bride and groom for a marriage, and Kim has considered one of these in his assortment as properly. One comes away with a way of Korea as a land the place the pure and crafted are inseparable, the place the solar units behind the mountain within the night, accompanied by seen brushstrokes.
“Kim Chong Hak, Painter of Seoraksan” is on view on the Excessive Museum of Artwork via November 2, 2025.
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