GuGu Kim

GuGu Kim:   Reinvigorating the Tradition of Korean Finger Painting

 

A celebrated, contemporary, Korean painter, GuGu Kim blends tradition and modernity in his works. His styles vary from realistic description in black-and-white to playful, naïve presentations in bright colors that were seemingly influenced by Joan Miro (Spanish; 1893–1983) and by so-called outsider art. The subjects of his paintings vary from ducklings and blossoms to human figures. Best-known among his works are his finger paintings depicting human figures, whether portraits of individuals, portrayals of religious deities (both Buddhist and Christian), or representations of aged couples, beautiful women, or close friends. Although he uses traditional Chinese / Korean ink, he applies it on canvas rather than on traditional paper or silk; the tonal contrast between the black ink and the white canvas imparts a stark immediacy.

 

GuGu Kim terms his works “finger paintings”, as he creates them with his fingers and hands, rather than with a brush. Rather than touching ink to canvas with a fingertip as both Asian and Western artists traditionally did in creating finger paintings—i.e., as if using the end of a finger as a “brush” or “pen” to draw—GuGu stamps the ink onto the canvas using that part of the finger with ridges constituting the fingerprint. In that context, his works might better be termed “finger- stamped paintings” in order to distinguish them from traditional finger paintings.

 

Stretching back at least to the eighteenth century and perhaps earlier, a few artists in both China

and Korea practiced finger painting by “drawing” with fingertips; best-known among them are Gao Qipei 高其佩 (1660–1734), China’s best-known finger painter, and Sim Sajeong 沈師正 (1707

1769), Korea’s most famous finger painter. Perhaps inspired by them, GuGu chose to master the technique of finger painting but reinvigorated that tradition and gave it a new twist by

inventing the technique of “finger stamping”.

 

In creating his finger paintings, GuGu dips a finger, or occasionally several fingers, into traditional ink and then presses the ink directly onto the canvas. The images emerge, not from drawing with lines or traditional brushwork, but from contrasts in tonality, from light to dark and through the entire range of intermediate tones. In some areas, the inked impressions might be very small, even just “dots”; in other areas, they might be relatively large, impressed with two or even three fingers. For areas that are to be very dark, even solid black and often suggesting deep shadows, GuGu stamps the areas repeatedly, so that there is a heavy application of ink, and no white canvas is visible. In areas that are to be very light, he stamps just once, or perhaps twice, so that the ink is only sparingly applied, and the viewer subconsciously senses the underlying white of the canvas.

 

GuGu’s paintings have been said aesthetically to resemble to those of Chuck Close (American; born 1940). More to the point his painting technique has been loosely compared to that of such French Pointillist artists as Georges Seurat (French; 1859–1891) and Paul Signac (French; 1863–1935), who used small, distinct dots of color applied in patterns to form an image. His work has also been likened to that of nineteenth-century French Divisionist painters, who used a similar technique of distinct patterns of colors to form images, though with larger cube-likebrushstrokes. Paintings in both styles require the viewer optically to combine the colors of the distinct dots or cubes of color instead of merely seeing single colors that the artist achieved by mixing pigments. Although they rely solely on black ink, rather than on color, GuGu’s black-and-white finger paintings, like the colored paintings of the French Pointillist and Divisionist painters, require the viewer to complete the images by optically linking the dots.

 

In fact, from the point of view of optics, GuGu’s stamped-ink paintings work in exactly the same manner as halftone-printed images - i.e., which gives the often grainy, black-and-white images seen in newspapers. Halftone is the reprographic technique that simulates continuous-tone imagery through the use of ink dots, varying in either size spacing, thus generating a gradient- like effect. The term “halftone” can also refer specifically to the image that is produced by this process.

 

Where continuous-tone imagery contains an infinite range of colors or grays, the halftone process reduces visual reproductions to an image that is printed - or stamped, in the case of GuGu’s finger paintings - with only one color of ink, in dots of differing size (pulse-width modulation), differing spacing (frequency modulation), or both. This relies on a basic optical illusion: the human eye interprets the area patterned with small dots - whether dots of stamped ink or halftone-printed dots - as if they were smooth, continuous tones and then “reads” those stamped patterns as visual images.

 

A mark of an important artist is often said to be that he created a new style or introduced a new artistic technique. With his    powerful, stamped-ink paintings, GuGu Kim has introduced both a new style and a new painting technique; his finger paintings thus are worthy of admiration for their beauty and human interest but for their technical innovations.

 

Robert D. Mowry

Alan J. Dworsky Curator of Chinese Art Emeritus

Harvard Art Museums

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