ArtSeen
Sa Suk-won
Gana Art October 16 – November 15, 2008

It has been said that among the three major countries in East Asia, Korean contemporary art is the least identifiable. This may imply that artists from the Republic of Korea are pretty much doing what they want to do. They are less apt to be ruled by trends in the market or to accept a uniform style that somehow makes the work look “Korean.” In this sense, Korean artists have adopted a transcultural approach in the way they think about art, one that moves ahead of mainstream globalization. Generally speaking, Koreans enjoy living as an independent people and therefore, by association, the art they produce may reflect this quality.
There is nothing mainstream about the work of Sa Suk-won. There is no school or movement with which his paintings are connected. There is no particular avant-garde tendency in his work. Sa’s paintings are made on blackboards on which immigrant workers from the ports of Incheon have written their sentiments, their fears, their intimate thoughts. He takes these blackboards to his studio and begins painting animals on top of the writing. The words of these immigrant workers is something the artist can relate to, for he himself was an outsider when he was a child. Sa Suk-won did not speak until he was seven years old. He was a “bad boy” in school and consistently failed to do his homework. As a result the teacher would humiliate him in front of the other students. He would have to face the blackboard each day as punishment. Often his ears were boxed, leaving him in excruciating pain. Sa suffered in front of the blackboard. The blackboard represented pain, torture, and hostility.
At a certain point in his young career as an artist, Sa had a courageous change of heart and began to accept the blackboard into his work and allow immigrants to inspire him with their painful and heartfelt writings. As a result, his expressionist-style animals—his rhinos and owls, his elephants and tigers, his lions, leopards, and cheetahs—form not merely a bestiary, but a personal lexicon that touches the inner-core of animal life. What is the core of the animals? How do they feel? The owls are painted with dense, staring eyes or a single eye, just as the feline have a single eye. The brushwork is steady yet frenetic, intense but never sullen. There is a kind of liberation in these paintings. Sa Suk-won borrows from his childhood pain and reinvests it in his adult life as an artist. His animals are on guard. They stalk. But they are afraid of nothing. They are never ferocious, but they retain an uncanny look, something out of Blake’s poem: “Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright / In the forest of the night. / What immortal hand or eye / Could frame Thy fearful symmetry.”
Yet Blake’s mysticism is less apparent in Sa’s work. His is more earthly, more given to the internal struggle of the soul trying to move forward in life. He expresses his sentiments in a remarkable passage in the catalog: “I sometimes paint half the animals’ bodies with masks on. A disappeared body is disappeared life, and a painted body remains forever. I want to talk about time, which is the destiny for living beings to vanish as time goes by.”
Another aspect of Sa’s painting focuses, in a similar expressionist style, on his hands, which are sometimes pierced with bird quills as in the painting called “Hand Acupuncture” (2008). Of course, there is a personal story behind this painting. Hands are very personal. To paint one’s hands is nearly as intimate as painting one’s face. Hands are portraits that reveal the violent potential of repose—like the lions, tigers, and cheetahs, seated alert somewhere in the meadow, the guardians of the world.
Contributor
Robert C. MorganRobert C. Morgan is a non-objective painter who lectures on art and writes art criticism. In 2017, he was given an overview of his career as an artist at Proyectos Monclova in Mexico City. Known primarily for his writing and curatorial projects, Morgan has published numerous books and catalogues internationally, now translated into 20 languages. His anthologies of criticism on Gary Hill and Bruce Nauman were published in 2000 and 2002 respectively through Johns Hopkins Press. www.robertcmorgan.com
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES

The Asia Society Triennial
By David Carrier, Yung-Wen (Mag) Yao, and Paul GladstonFEB 2021 | ArtSeen
The exhibitions We Do Not Dream Alone, the inaugural Asia Society Triennial, and Dreaming Together at the New-York Historical Society bring together works by over 40 artists selected from the collections of both institutions in a thoughtful and very welcome showcasing of the work of Asian and Asian-diasporic artists still underrepresented in mainstream Euro-American contexts. At this moment, when the movement of people and even artworks is difficult, the mere existence of this two-museum show is a major accomplishment.

Singing in Unison:
Artists Need to Create On the Same Scale That Society Has the Capacity to Destroy
JUNE 2022 | Art
Rail Curatorial Projects is proud to present Singing in Unison: Artists Need to Create on the Same Scale that Society Has the Capacity to Destroy, a multi-venue series of exhibitions that aims to foster social unity in light of the recent political climate and the COVID-19 pandemic. The works shown in these exhibitions exemplify the breadth of the creative world, with artists who are taught and self-taught, young and old, and hailing from every corner of the globe. Singing in Unison is a timely endeavor that celebrates the power of art as a public site to stage programming, including poetry readings, music and dance performances, panel discussions on the subject of democracy, and cooking performances by Rirkrit Tiravanija. All of this is done with the aim of enhancing the art of joining in our various communities and to bring people together.
Lisa Slominski’s Nonconformers: A New History of Self-Taught Artists
By Jo Lawson-TancredJUNE 2022 | Art Books
Building on the history of Outsider art dating back to the 1970s, this book dives into the implications, limits, and paradoxes of the popular and problematic label. Placing the emphasis on the artists themselves and the formal properties of their work, the book foregrounds their practices over excessive biographic detail.
Peter Sacks: Republic
By Jonathan GoodmanMARCH 2021 | ArtSeen
Like the artists who shaped movements such as Constructivism and Suprematism, Sacks seeks to ally abstraction with social commentary, even a radical view. Here, the social implications of Sacks's outlook are linked to a complex collage of different sources of cloth: his materials come from all over the world, as if proposing a kind of internationalism that might be able to respond to the limits imposed by the isolation and xenophobia of many around the world.