To celebrate the 140th anniversary of diplomatic relations between France and Korea, the Cernuschi Museum invites you to discover, through a monographic exhibition, around thirty works by the Korean artist Shin Sung Hy (1948-2009).
Shin Sung Hy (1948-2009) is now a recognized figure in the Korean art world, where he has benefited from numerous exhibitions and been included in many public collections. He is also an important figure in cultural exchanges between his homeland and France, where he lived from 1980 until his death in 2009. Yet his work has remained relatively little seen in his adopted country, despite a particularly rich and fruitful dialogue with the French artistic scene. While Shin Sung Hy's work maintains obvious, albeit distant, ties with dansaekhwa, a Korean pictorial movement that emerged in the 1970s and literally translates as "monochrome painting," it is above all deeply nourished by the example of Supports-Surfaces, an ephemeral yet influential collective of French artists active between 1969 and 1971.
Deconstructing Painting
In the early 1970s, Shin Sung Hy's colorful, figurative oil paintings on canvas seemed in every way opposed to the minimalist aesthetic and new ways of interacting with their support practiced by his counterparts in the dansaekhwa movement. Admittedly, as early as 1974, Shin Sung Hy significantly toned down his palette by opting for trompe-l'œil depictions of jute canvases rendered in shades of brown. However, these works did not constitute an alignment with dominant trends in Korea. They retained the representative function of painting, abandoned by dansaekhwa, in order to question the very nature of pictorial production. The absurd doubling, via trompe-l'œil, of a painted jute canvas on a real jute canvas introduces a dissonance between what is represented and the nature of the actual object offered to the gaze. Shin Sung Hy continued this work after arriving in France in 1980, hoping to be freer to pursue his research. Very quickly, he returned to color in works that constituted a deconstruction, or even a literal destruction, of painting. These pieces were made of painted cardboard torn into pieces, then glued onto Plexiglas, onto other cardboard, or layered upon one another.
Return to Painting
If tearing apart an existing work represents a radical and explicit questioning of painting as both practice and object, the repositioning of cardboard fragments into a rectangular shape on a Plexiglas plate, or their assembly to reconstruct a support, testifies to Shin Sung Hy's desire to maintain a dialogue with this discipline. Indeed, Shin Sung Hy returned to easel painting in the 1990s. Although he continued to produce cardboard works for a few years, regularly incorporated found elements into his pieces, and persisted in experimenting with supports, these supports were henceforth most often canvases stretched on frames. A pronounced taste for colors led Shin Sung Hy to create vibrant and warm abstract compositions, whose backgrounds, dominated by yellows, reds, pinks, and oranges, were punctuated and structured by spots and lines.
Stitchings
In the early 1990s, Shin Sung Hy developed several series of works grouped under the name "Couturages" (Stitchings), which materially differed from the productions of the previous decade. Nevertheless, they are partly their heirs, synthesizing a desire to return to easel painting with the spirit of the cardboard works created between the 1980s and the early 1990s. It was still a matter of fragmented and recomposed painting, but this time presented as a canvas stretched on a frame. Shin Sung Hy would first create an abstract painting. He would then tear the canvas into strips, rearrange them in a new order, and sew them together or onto another canvas. The edges of the strips could be folded outward, creating raised hems that separated each colored space, or turned inward, placing the different painted zones in direct contiguity, like a patchwork.
Knotting
While continuing his "Couturages" series into the early 2000s, Shin Sung Hy developed a new technique in 1997 that gave rise to the "Nouages" (Knotting) series. He would first paint a canvas, then cut it into strips 1 to 2 cm wide. He would then tie these strips to one another and connect them to a frame or another partially cut canvas, creating a three-dimensional work animated by a vibrant network of knots, laces, and holes. This production builds a bridge between the works of Supports-Surfaces—which it recalls through its treatment of the support not as a surface to be covered, but as a material to be worked—and Korean culture. On one hand, dansaekhwa artists, like Shin Sung Hy, tend more willingly to respect the framework of easel painting than their French counterparts. On the other hand, Korea has elevated the creation of certain types of knots to the status of art, now classified as intangible cultural heritage.
Source: paris.fr — photo: Courtesy Shin Sung Hy estate / gallery hyundai