Black Painting 

The sound hovers in an empty space but is not the empty space it hovers through. I sense this space is nature and has the energy of life. Flowing water, soaring mountains and leisurely floating clouds develop the energy by ceaselessly colliding with yin and yang. The unseen forces of space ensure the existence of the universe. Here, in this moment, is my existence in this infinite space. My process of painting began by appreciating the invisible signs within the environment around me.

Many things, which seemed to be permanent, are crumbling to dust. Today, once again, I am looking at my body and mind that easily get hurt. Accepting it as the fate, I get myself refreshed and calm.

In my painting, black has a power to absorb all the colors including the three primary colors. It also reminds me of those natural environments, that is, the black mountain, sea, and forest in the South Pacific region where I spent 15 years in searching for Paul Gauguin's utopia. It also reflects my childhood memory of that darkness of Chinese ink soaking into hanji [Korean traditional paper]. Something white resonates and vibrates through a black space. It is a record of my memory, hope, and dream that are arising from the deep in my mind just as a dim light of dawn is coming out of a dark night or a long dark tunnel.

I focus attention more on how to express human sensibilities than on how to express the shape and color of an object.

I try to bring out some unconscious affects in the kernel of the human mind by harnessing spontaneous liquidities such as flowing or spreading, that is, effects occurring by chance. These affects are not only my feelings of despair, frustration, hope, remorse, and nostalgia I had in the isolated South Pacific region, but also those of reassurance, presence, change, and urgency I had after I returned to Korea. Looking at all the rapid environmental, seasonal, and weather changes, I also wanted to express the passing of time through variations in color tone in the painting.

My painting is unique in terms of materials I use, for I mix special black gesso, white, and medium to create singular expressions.

The pale white bands on the black background have been created by the traces left by my brushstrokes. With equanimity I regained through a long mediation, as well as with a slow deep breath, I began to paint with a wide, full-soaked brush. When the brush was slightly raised, a black background made its ambiguous appearance. This resulted in duality that straddle between fullness and emptiness, between spreading and soaking, and between nothingness and the presence of a landscape. This phenomenon, when it converged with a flow of water from above, became a sublime image of a natural landscape.

Water flows down from a higher to a lower place according to the law of gravity. Little streams of water left by a brushstroke flow down and gather in a place to form one stream. When the water in the stream spills over, it flows down vertically once again across the black figures. This process looks similar to the way in which rivers, which originated from the Taebaek Mountains, the spine of the Korean peninsula, flow down along numerous mountains and valleys and finally reach the sea. And then, the sea evaporates into the sky, and nature circulates this way.

Once all the water gets dried out, some vertical and horizontal stains remain on the canvas. In the sense that the black background and the long horizontal and vertical stains get together to form the grand history of nature, this can be called “black painting” where a traditional calligraphic technique meets contemporary materials.

Nature circulates all by itself and provides all the living beings with beneficial energies. We still live in a corner of nature as little beings. I come to realize this ordinary law of nature through my work. Also, thinking about this work, I look back on our materialistic world.

Just as a day contains both brightness and darkness, our daily life flows in repeating both. To me, the painting is a window for communicating with others and a place for sharing a dream about a utopia.

(December 2018. Yang Gyu-Joon)