Ho Sook Kang: Painting As Meditation by Donald Kuspit
Ho Sook Kang is a modernist painter--she's acutely conscious of the medium, absorbed in its physicality--but she's a modernist painter with an Oriental edge: her gestures--sometimes very grand, but more often intimate--have a concentration suggesting that their energy is meditatively focused. They seem chanted and ceremonial rather than aggressively expressionist--careful, delicate, understated acts rather than bold, brash, abrasive actions. Compared to American action painting, Kang's painterly acts seem inhibited; but from her Oriental perspective, American action painting seems shamelessly exhibitionistic.
If abstract art is the consummate means of communicating what Kandinsky famously called "internal necessity," then it is a matter of the quality of inward depth in abstraction. In American action painting it means enacting raw feeling, implying that the instincts in which it originates are uncontrollable, while in Kang's Orientalist action painting it means refining feeling, so that it is brought under ego control and stabilized, and can be aesthetically contemplated, that is, incorporated into the conscious self and used to fertilize its growth and understanding. The goal of Kang's Orientalist action painting is self-consciousness not self-expression--more particularly, the transformation of self-expression into self-consciousness. If American action painting is informed by avant-garde primitivism--the climactic statement of the "noble savagery" that Gauguin pursued--then Kang's action painting is informed by the Oriental ideal of meditative calm, holding its own whatever emotional and social storms threaten it.
There is little or no storm and stress in Kang's paintings, but a certain sublime serenity, perhaps most evident in a pink and white painting--the white "sky" forming a valley between the pink "mountains," the whole resembling the upper section of a Valentine heart, or else a woman's breasts. These associations are no doubt foolish and misleading, but they convey the delicate eroticism that tinges Kang's contemplative stance. The fact that her abstraction is built up of minute, systematically repeated gestures is more to the aesthetic and meditative point. It is as though Kang has invested her consciousness in every one of the details, counterbalancing their evocative color and expressive movement. Each is in effect a meditative moment in her own consciousness. The total effect is of an inwardly luminous atmosphere--a space of sheer transcendence, charged with quiet energy, glorious serenity, and self-assured consciousness.
In the monochromatic paintings--but, like all of Kang's paintings, they fuse subtly differentiated color tones into a flowing surface--it becomes clear that the whole is implicit in the detail, indeed, an "extension" of its repetition. The monochromatic paintings seem to be derived from Oriental landscape paintings. It is as though Kang has distilled them--and the nature that is their point of departure--to their abstract essence. There is something elemental about the repetitive flow of detail in Kang's abstractions, but it is the elemental brought under control of consciousness by way of meditation. In some of the paintings the color blazes--the mingled blue and green shine with inner light--with natural force, in others it is muted and elusive. It evokes nature at a contemplative remove, but nature that has not lost its force--and internal necessity. It is as though Kang has articulated the Tao--the ineffable spirit--that flows through everything. There is a graciousness and fluidity to Kang's abstractions that can only come from the innocent strength of the Tao.
There is abstract expressionist storminess in the grandly swirling gestures of a mostly orange and white painting--the curves have a vigor and breadth that convey apocalyptic energy--but there is also an over-all rhythm, keeping them on course, as it were. In other words, the current is under control--the power of instinct is harnessed for aesthetic purpose. Clement Greenberg points out that the most aesthetically convincing abstraction has what he called a decorative unity, and Kang's abstractions are aesthetically convincing by way of their rhythm. In the monochrome it sounds like a humming tuning fork--recall Kandinsky's idea of abstraction as visual music--while in the more dramatically expressionistic painting it has a percussive aspect, but the "color sounds" form a fugal pattern.
This musical intermixture of colors is especially subtle in a group of four small paintings. Reading from left to right, we move from a densely packed surface of blue gestures and white highlights to a somewhat more tenuous, transparent surface, in which pure white dominates. All the paintings are atmospheric, but in the last one it is as though the blue clouds have cleared, revealing a transcendental sky. In all four works the handling is different--gestures and tones are subtly modified, and the flow and rhythm seem to change
--but the sense of elusiveness and ineffability are constant. Can we say that they are abstract representations of the mood of the sky in each of the four seasons, tracked as they change from one to another? Kandinsky has emphasized the importance of mood in painting, as a manifestation of inner necessity. We meditate on the mood of Kang's paintings, as she meditates on the changing mood of nature, or rather creates an abstract mood in which we become absorbed through meditation.
A diptych composed of two largely green paintings with clusters of yellow pyramids
--there is a third painting, similarly colored, which, I think would work very well with them--suggests a similar shifting of mood, but the over-all sense is of agitation rather then serenity. Gestural flickering intensifies into lightning-like streaks or ominously dark furrows. Nonetheless, the pyramids, mostly yellow but sometimes green, and sometimes transparent and overlapping, float along, peculiarly detached from the environment in which they participate. They hold their form--maintain their geometrical integrity--suggesting their transcendental meaning. Geometry is as much of eternity as we are able to know on earth, Plato remarked, and Kang's painting is suffused with earthly green. The stable pyramids exist in the midst of the gesturally moving landscape. The landscape seems inwardly conflicted, the pyramids serenely transcendental. Their tension makes the inner power of Kang's meditational abstractions transcendentally clear.