Paintings using mother-
of-pearl and lacquer

Park, Young-Taik
Art Critique, Professor at Kyonggi University

Sungap Kim’s paintings using mother-of-pearl and lacquer on wood present a unique skin for paintings, which are externally abstract paintings characterized by color abstraction, objet d’art paintings composed of matters, monochrome and minimal structure.
Void of brush strokes, bodily traces or expressive vestiges, his paintings are wrapped in solid membranous bodies painted entirely with colors/matters without forms or concrete representational images.

Completely indicative of only surfaces, his screens still expansively broaden the panels that swallow the deep profound interior not the skin which is a flat even physical plane. They bring up the image of the cosmic space where there are no up/down/left/right sides and where the senses of time and directions are meaningless. Unnamable profound low chromatic colors stately and fully unfold on his screens, where small colorful dots emit lights, embedded like grains of sand or chips. Then the lights lead us to unknowingly recall some images or draw lines just like chasing the stars pointing to constellations. It is said that constellations are not made by stars but human eyes. After all, Kim’s work seeks to actively engage with viewers and their imagination.
Instead of canvas, Kim uses a solid and hard wood surface as a substrate, on which he sprinkles mother-of-pearl particles and fixes them with a mixture of lacquer and pigments. The resultant surface flickers in a mixture of matters and colors, blurring the boundary between the center and surroundings. The tiny dots glow inside holding some remote abysses and serve as certain clues for viewers to unroll their diverse imagination. Yet that doesn’t necessarily reach certain specific objects of representation. Those dots and particles are merely and sneakingly breathing in the gross darkness or in a pile of sunken colors. They are in a state of brightness, a moment of sparkling or just floating around as tiny little pieces and countless glimpses.
Inside the screen, lines curve and circle, form semicircles or round streamlined shapes, draw the trajectories of whirling lines, or just have straight or oblique lines traversing the screen. The flow and rhythm of its smooth curves and simple straight lines carve up the texture (pattern) of the paulownia wood and the monochromatic color layers that occupy thereupon. Their trajectories are reminiscent of the strokes of quills, textures of wind, cosmic waves and flows of energy/chi.

However, most of all, the landscape of the mother-of-pearl particles shattering and sparkling against the abysmally sinking tones of the screen vaguely resembles the stars in the expansive azure sky, the clusters of the Galaxy or a cosmic landscape beyond the survey of man. It is not a scene visible to the eye, but one pictured at heart or a fictional one hypothesized by imagination.

Kim lays the screen horizontally on the floor to align them with each other before sprinkling or spilling the particles of mother-of-pearl on it. The law of gravity makes the fine mother-of-pearl dust fall toward the floor and scatter. The process of shaping or drawing some images while spilling the dust is comparable to the methodology of finger painting. Without directly painting on the screen, Kim still relies on the tactility of his fingers to repeat the process of spraying and applying the mother-of-pearl dust, fixing it, applying the lacquer and thereby creating reliefs on the surface. Via the process, the mother-of-pearl rises to certain different heights from the surface and germinates while stimulating the tactility. Still, the sanded surface is relatively homogeneously finished, converging the different sizes and modalities and non-homogeneous shapes of the mother-of-pearl on the even skin as much as possible. The process of sprinkling the particles, forming some shapes, mixing the lacquer and pigments, applying multiple coats of the mixture, and sanding them down renders the screen into a deeply submerged space.

Kim uses the paulownia wood board as a material and as a screen. He slices the wood into a relatively thin flat surface. Then, he burns and oxidizes its skin/membrane. When the paulownia wood is burned, its grain is clearly visible, revealing the so-called a ‘picture’. He says burning and carbonizing the skin of the paulownia wood turns its surface into charcoal, preventing the so-called shrinkage while revealing its unique attractive lines, which is why he makes the most of the very process. He then applies lacquer to the surface of the paulownia wood. Five to ten coats of lacquer are applied repeatedly. The lacquer builds up as he creates the texture considering the thickness of the mother-of-pearl on top of it. Our ancestors thought of the paulownia wood as the perfect material for storing documents, clothing and important items that are susceptible to moisture, since its special fibers facilitate the dryness and moisture control. It was a special wood material that was loved by scholars in Joseon because of its blackish matte surface suitable as the material for items in the minimal atmosphere of their study rooms.

Kim prefers the paulownia wood as a material mainly for the taste and aesthetic sense of the ancient scholars in particular. The pursuit of inner beauty rather than appearance and natural beauty rather than artificial one along with the dignified aesthetic sense of the scholars of integrity and composure is the essence of the scholastic culture in Joseon.

Kim’s approach is comparable to that of traditional oriental painting in terms of his act of applying a line like a brush stroke with a quill on a screen aligned with the floor surface, and his attempt to employ natural materials and handle them with the least possible artificiality not to tamper with their essence, while seeking to thoroughly investigate the order of nature and align their inherent nature with his creative techniques and themes. Kim describes his work as a kind of literary painting and ink painting. That is, literary paintings or paintings using lacquer and mother-of-pearl. That’s why he underscores the spirit of literary painting. Kim seems to take the integrity and austerity, the restraint aesthetics and frugality, and the dignified aesthetics of the scholarly spirit as the backbone of his work. Such aspects are seemingly demonstrated in his current monochromatic color aesthetics, minimal compositions and restrained screen approaches. Kim emphasizes that his abundant experience and history of creating landscape paintings and literary paintings have laid the foundation for his current work. This is how his paintings equivalent to scholarly or literary paintings using mother-of-pearl and lacquer on paulownia wood have substantially come into being.