Born in 1935,
Choi Man Lin belongs to the last generation of artists who directly experienced
upheavals of Korean contemporary history such as Japanese colonial rule and the
Korean War. At the same time, Choi also belongs to the first generation of
students ever to receive an art degree from a Korean university after the
Korean War. From this background, he has incessantly striven to both succeed
the discontinued traditions of his homeland and harmonize them with
contemporary art. Through ongoing contemplation of the identity of Korean
sculpture and self-examination of his own work, Choi established his own
aesthetic vocabulary. For the development of Korean contemporary art, Choi Man
Lin has exerted a continuing influence as an artist, an educator and an administrator,
playing a pivotal role in leading the field of Korean sculpture forward from
relatively modest foundations.
Starting from
his early works of the late 1950s, this exhibition provides a comprehensive
flow of Choi’s art that proceeds to his most recent works. Surveying works
spanning almost 60 years, viewers may witness the trajectory of an artist whose
painful experiences of a war from his youth inevitably influenced his
fascination with the theme of life’s persistence, such that he would develop
that theme as an enduring motif of his art. As such, his art begins with his
awareness of the will to survive, as exemplified by a person’s will to survive
and to rebound from demolition. Choi’s art then expands into his exploration of
the principles of nature and of the universe on which such countless
wills-to-live depend. It eventually develops into a ceaseless inquiry into the
fundamental form of human beings and other living organisms. Such fundamental
forms may be achieved only through embracing emptiness and discarding the
superfluous.
1. Humanity (1958-1965)
“Born of scorched earth devastated by war, Eve was a piece in which
I piled up our dismantled conditions of the time. Eve was a monument for myself
as well as a huge monument of survival which I produced by gathering fragments of
life and piling them up.”
(Choi Man Lin, from an interview in Wolgan Misool Art Magazine, June 2001)
Choi Man Lin’s art education at Seoul
National University, primarily from teachers who had trained in Japan, was
heavily based in Western practices and techniques, with a strong emphasis on
the human form. The Eve series began
in the late 1950s, immediately following the Korean War. The series poses
questions about the essence of humankind through rendering the human body in a
distorted fashion, moving away from realistic representations. The series
features rough surfaces and limb-less figures. Such features are reminiscent of
the harshness of the war he experienced during his adolescent years. Here,
figures overcoming wretched devastation can be interpreted as the instinctual
will for life that emerges in such situations of complete destruction.
As
his debut collection, the Eve series
bears great importance because it introduces the theme that grows to infuse all
of his works. Choi’s sculptural exploration of the human form in the Eve series eventually leads to explorations
of his belief in mankind and of his wider interest in life itself in later
series.
2. Roots (1965-1977)
Sky, Earth, Black, and Yellow
After
the success of the Eve series, Choi
Man Lin realized the limitations of figurative work based on the Western
education in sculpture he had received. Thus, he began to contemplate the
identity of Korean sculpture. He had an awareness that Korean sculpture should
be based on or rooted in the Korean tradition even as it aspires to a modern
form. Such awareness was shared by many of Choi’s contemporaneous artists.
Consumed by his aspiration to capture inherent “Korean-ness” in his sculpture,
he ceaselessly sought an aesthetic vocabulary uniquely grown in Korea and independent
from the logical and analytical mode of thinking of the West. As a result, he
produced the Sky, Earth, and Black series
that embodied the styles of Chinese characters, based on inspiration from
traditional calligraphy. The series also represents his attempt to switch from
analytic thinking to intuitive thinking by discarding the pencil as an
implement in favor of the brush. From calligraphy styles of Chinese characters
in which sign, meaning and form are combined, he discovered the possibility of
integrative, intuitive, and abstract sculpture in which form and content are
indistinguishable.
Sun and Moon
The
Chinese poem The Thousand-Character
Classic, commonly used as a primer for studying calligraphy, includes
hieroglyphs representing principles of the universe. Choi found a clue to Korea’s
own abstract sculpture from the styles of the Classic. In subsequent work, he naturally combined his interest in life,
which had emerged in the Eve series,
with his understanding of the Eastern philosophical view of nature represented
in the Classic. Associated with
yin/yang philosophy, this understanding lead Choi to other series such as Sun and Moon and Sky and Earth, which
represented the universal and natural principles of which every living being
consists. The works feature smooth bronze surfaces and forms suggesting circles
or vertical lines. As such, they demonstrate that the formal frame of his later
works such as Placenta and the O series was established at this stage.
Sky and Earth
The Sky
and Earth series was produced around the same time and in association
with the Sun and Moon series.
The works of Sky and Earth series
share a similar basic axis: a vertical line that seems to shoot straight up.
These works attempt to represent natural principles through elements of both
harmony and contrast, with short horizontal movements that seem to protrude.
These forms would continue to evolve in the ensuing Grace series and Placenta series.
Grace
The Grace series was produced in welded iron, and it began when Choi
Man Lin was studying at the Pratt Institute of New York City in the mid-1970s.
Living abroad for a short term served as an opportunity to redefine Choi’s
identity as a Korean, as well as to further his search for the sculpture of
Korea and to strengthen his will to pursue that search. Works in the Grace series were formed by accreting “drops”
of liquid iron after melting the iron into smaller units. The forms of a
convoluted circle and upward vertical line are central to the series. Although
such forms place the Grace series in a
context similar to that of Choi’s other works, the works of this series suggest
the process of the production much more powerfully and directly.
3. Life (1975-1989)
Placenta
Produced
over about a 10-year period beginning in the late 1970s, the Placenta series joins the Eve series as Choi Man Lin’s best-known
work. Breaking from Choi’s comprehensive and metaphysical address of universal
and natural principles, the Placenta series
deals with the theme of life in a detailed and concrete way, delving into its
subject matter at a direct and humanistic level. Reminiscent of the internal
organs of an animal, the organic shapes of the series seem to wriggle and to emit
the primitive energy of life. Furthermore, as the beginning and the end of the
forms cross and interlock with each other, they offer the sensation of infinite
movement. As such, the series is related to the circle of life that entails
creation, growth, and extinction.
Vein
The
Vein series was produced at intervals
during the 1980s while Choi Man Lin worked primarily on the Placenta series. This series is essentially
an extension of the Placenta series
in terms of its embodiment of life energy. While the Placenta series expresses the fundamental form of life with an
emphasis on organic features and the growth of life, the Vein series can be interpreted to embody life-sustaining energy or
life force in the form of a vital power expanding in all directions.
4. Void (1987-2013)
Developing the theme of the fundamental
form of life in his Placenta, Vein, and Dot series eventually lead Choi Man Lin
to the desire to connote the comprehensive signification of life while at the
same time transcending its conceptual representation. Thus, it is in the O
series that the will of the artist was expressed in its most reductive way. The
title O was chosen in order to avoid the fallacy that a concept precedes or
refines a form. As such, this series exemplifies his desire to eliminate
unnecessary explanations and to discard any secondary elements. The series also
signifies that Choi’s art has arrived at an open center space of his lifelong
journey toward the root and origin of life and art. This space embraces all
only by emptying and discarding all.
Dot
After
about ten years of work on the Placenta series, Choi Man Lin resolved to begin
anew from a clean slate. The Dot series was produced with this mindset of
seeking a new beginning. Ultimately, sculptural works develop to fill a
three-dimensional space. Thus, as a sculpture, a “dot” symbolizes the moment of
birth of a form, or the beginning of everything. This use of the dot form was
also influenced by Choi’s late 1960s experience contemplating the idea of
Korean sculpture, when he spent time marking dots with a brush on paper and
came to realize points, lines and planes as indistinguishable. For the Dot
series, Choi mixed two different materials and emphasized protruding forms.
Such expressive forms suggest new sprouts arising from the ground and
germinating.
