“Weeds” (1989) presents a homogenous plane that does not distinguish the background from the main images. The piece being unfolded with no hierarchical composition or organizational logic of background or center, is the manifestation of the primitive aspect of Mother Nature that has been forgotten in urban life, as well as the “Seorak internalized in the mind of the artist” or “the inner landscape of an artist living in Mt. Seorak,” according to Oh Kwang Soo. Critic Kim Hyung-kook said, “Kim’s interpretation of Mt. Seorak with colors and forms” has helped establish Kim’s own visual language of representational landscape painting based on the spirit of abstract art that features subject matter that might have been cliche in landscape painting such as mountains, water, flowers or plants.
Kim Chong Hak (b. 1937) was born in Sinuiju, North Pyeongan Province, and later defected to the South in 1948 when he was twelve. After graduating from the Department of Painting at Seoul National University in 1962, Kim studied printmaking at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, currently Tokyo University of the Art, between 1968 and 1970 before he enrolled in the graphics center at the Pratt Institute in 1977. He held as many as 20 solo exhibitions, including at Gana Art Center in 2006, Gallery Yeh in 2008, the “Kim Chong Hak Retrospective” at the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea, currently MMCA in 2011, and “KIM Chong-Hak: Tenderness” at Gallery Hyundai in 2012. His numerous group exhibitions included, “Three Artists: Kwak Hoon, Kim woong, Kim Chong-Hak” in 1999 at Gallery Yeh and “In the Midst of the Korean Contemporary Art” at Gallery Hyundai in 2010. Kim was the recipient of the 2nd Lee In Sung Art Prize in 2001, and the Up and Coming Artist Prize at the 5th International Print Biennial, Tokyo, in 1966. He served on the faculty of the Department of Fine Art Education at Kangwon National University and the College of Fine Arts, Seoul National University.
Having been known as “the painter of Seorak,” Kim Chong Hak is being called a Byeorak Mountaineer as well. This nickname was created by Song Young Bang, a traditional Korean painter as well as a university colleague of Kim’s, to refer Kim as “another Mt.Seorak,”or “the alter ego of Mt. Seorak.” Kim Chong Hak and Mt. Seorak were an all-around pair of some sort. However, Kim did not initiate his oeuvre by drawing landscapes or the flowers and plants of Mt. Seorak. He attended art school while the nation was recovering from the aftermath of the Korean War. When he began to practice art after graduation, Korean art circles were overwhelmed by modernism, including Abstract expressionism or Art Informel from the West. While Kim was serving in the military, the 1960 Artists Association founded by Kim Bongtae and Yoon Myeongro, among others, staged an anti-national art exhibition that displayed art on the wall of Deoksugung Palace？the so-called “Wall Exhibition,” in which Kim Chong Hak also took part, hanging his American abstract expressionist-inspired works on the wall. He was able to have the opportunity to study printmaking at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, currently Tokyo University of the Art, after winning an award at the 5th International Biennial Exhibition of Prints Tokyo in 1966. Such a relationship with woodblock printmaking first began thanks to the ease of access to the material and process compared to other printmaking techniques; yet in fact, the underlying force was the beauty of traditional wooden vessels, a subject matter Kim indulged in for many years. Kim discovered a modern sense of aesthetics from simple forms and the exceptional proportional properties of old wooden containers. The paintings featuring Mt. Seorak familiar to the beholders were created starting in 1979. Given the history of mainstream Korean art circles shifting from representational art to abstraction, Kim’s change in style from abstraction to representational painting, can be extraordinary enough. Kim Chong Hak’s Seorak paintings, however, do not merely focus on presenting the outer appearance of the mountain. Each object depicted through his intrepid brushstrokes that seem to be far from detailed sophisticated technique is, according to art critic Oh Kwang Soo: “individual yet general at the same time, on which the individuality as an object and the generalness as a landscape overlap each other.”
