“The Land I Should Plough” series depicts the land and the farmers whose lives are based on it. The land and farmers appear frequently in Kim’s works as his main subjects representing the ordinary people and their lives. The depiction of ruined lands evokes not only the land that the farmers must plough and farm but also the motherland on which all Koreans live, the basis of life that all Koreans must cherish and enrich. Most of Kim’s works focusing on the land are distinctive in that they focus on a figure abruptly deployed forward in the landscape as if stubbornly refusing the traditional rules of Western painting. These rules include the use of perspective, against the backdrop of land stretching out across the horizon, along with the division of the frame and the use of intense, starkly contrasting colors. These are the tools Kim employed in creating a powerful statement and attempting to foster communication. “The Land I Should Plough” (1987), an entry in Kim Jeong-heon’s solo exhibition held at Geurimmadang Min in 1988, portrays a bare-chested young man standing on a road, firmly gripping the handle of a hoe. He stands obliquely in the left corner of the canvas, framed in a close-up against the backdrop of green mountains and fields with paddies stretching out in the distance. The rusty steel chains at his back symbolize the agony he must feel while facing the rural farming village that has been deserted by the people, as well as the feelings of the farmers who have suffered from the devastation of their rural villages
Kim Jeong-heon (b. 1946) received his bachelor’s degree from the Department of Painting at the Seoul National University College of Fine
Arts in 1972, where he also received his master’s in 1977. He has held solo exhibitions at Gyeonji Art Museum in 1977; Geurimmadang Min in 1988; Culture Hakgojae Gallery in 1993; and Gongju and Art Center in 2004. He has also taken part in a number of group exhibitions including “Korean Experimental Artists Exhibition” at Daegu Department Store Gallery in 1974; “Reality and Utterance？Inaugural Exhibition” at Dongsanbang Gallery in 1980; “Controversial Artists of the Year of 1981” at Seoul Museum in 1982; “Controversial Artists of the Year of 1981-1984” at Seoul Museum in 1986; “Korean Art: Today's Situation” at Hangaram Museum of Seoul Arts Center in
1990; “Face of Our Time: Human and Nature” at Geurimmadang Min in 1992; “Commemorative Exhibition of Centennial of Donghak Peasants Revolution” at Hangaram Museum of Seoul Arts Center in 1994; “Mountains and Streams of the Fatherland” at ARKO Art Center in 1995; “The 1980’s Minjung Art and the Age” at Gana Art Center in 2001; “The Battle of Visions” at Kunsthalle Darmstadt, Darmstadt, in 2005; and “GanaArt Collection Anthology” at Seoul Museum of Art in 2016. Kim is the recipient of a citation from the Minister of Justice in 1985; the Site Award at the Gwangju Biennale in 1995; and the Yellow Stripes Order of Service Merit in 2006. He served on the faculty of the Department of Fine Arts Education at Kongju National University’s College of Education from 1980 to 2010. He also served as chairperson of Arts Council Korea from 2007 to 2008, and director of the Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture from 2012 to 2015.
Kim Jeong-heon initially displayed the modernist characteristics that had prevailed in the 1970s Korean art world until his first solo exhibition in 1977. But after founding the artists’ group Reality and Utterance in the 1980s and playing a decisive role in establishing the Korean People’s Arts Association in 1985, Kim stood out as one of the leading artists of Minjung Art. As he remarked, Kim regarded modernism, the main current in the 1970s Korean art world, as “a form of neocolonialism cultural subordination” and sought a new path for art to awaken and overcome it. The resulting works constituted a language for making concrete statements about life at that time, and a form of Minjung Art that pursued communication with the wider public. As for his subjects, Kim mostly employed those things that could easily be found in our daily lives, or social issues such as the empty lives of laborers or peasants and the paradoxical situation of a divided country. This was the result of Kim’s intention to highlight and focus on the thematic consciousness rather than formal experimentation in art.
