The sculptures of Rhee Donghoon (1991-) are axiomatic. They are axiomatic on multiple fronts. And the act of critiquing work that is axiomatic can be, at times, a senseless undertaking, slipping into tautology. Still, there are ways in which such repetition reveals difference, and this, in turn, can lead both to interest and to meaningful play.
The paintings of Rhee Donghoon, on the other hand, are not axiomatic. At least, they have not been so far. This is because something remains — something in the objective or the process of the work itself — that ultimately elides elucidation. Even those of his paintings derived from his sculpture, which do have a clarity of orientation, are still ambiguous in terms of identity. As such, these incomplete canvases, reduced into an aspect of ostensible “completion,” can feel almost like adolescents still in the process of socialization. By this same token, however, these paintings are also able to return a “nontrivial dynamism” to the sculptures themselves. And at this point, of course, this is all still the story of a beginning, a positing of possible near-futures.
Reviewing an artistic world only now coming into its own can be a rather futile exercise. Such futile exercises can be good and they can be bad. For the artistic world of a young man to grow in directions that depart from that which was once captured — or predicted — on the page, is not only to be expected but to be desired. Though this is not to say that such growth is always a given. Indeed, there have been cases where the critic’s intellectual play, presented as excessive hypotheses and exposition, is taken not as a springboard to leap in new directions but as a kind of guide for where to go next: an extremely discouraging scenario. The you who emerged in my writing, after all, was never the actual you.
In truth, any critique that explicates a full accounting of an artist’s work, beginning to end, can harm the works still to come. If a specific work, for example, is comprehended as “pathosformel,” then that work will always appear to hold something more than the emotions of the artist himself. The emotions of the contemporary age permeate such works, soaked in through the artist’s subconscious and practice, even as the artist’s own conventional actions, modalities, and symbolic variations result in a gradual accumulation of historical sentiment. For such an artist’s artistic world to slip naturally into the time and space of the unknown, the discourse and the work must miss one another by an (in)appropriate degree. It is the (semi-)autonomous work, running from the artist’s own written statement, that leads the artist and their artistic world toward a kind of magical growth. Few things, after all, are as boring as those works that simply give shape to an original intention as-is, having undergone a process carried out by a whole, sound mind in accordance with a plan laid out by that same whole, sound mind. Happily, Rhee Donghoon’s works tend to stray quite far from the artist’s original plans and language. The question of just how much awareness the artist himself has of the potential inherent in this state of affairs may prove to be crucial, moving forward; or it may not matter at all. Indeed, there are times when the work itself uses the artist as the vehicle for realizing its own potential.
Any artistic world that manifests an organic system through the artist seeks an abstract form that corresponds to the true nature of its existence. And while the actual form of the specific figure of manifestation may vary, the outline remains constant — so long as the artist does not resist the reason of the organic system and its flow.
Though there are intergenerational inherited objectives from which form can be inferred and realized when any auto-organic system begins to coalesce, we also see further variation and realization in terms of shape, as determined by the activity and necessary situational purpose of each work. As such, figures rendered material according to given periods of work appear in keeping with their existential objective as objects, shaped in accordance with the direction of their chronological evolution; it is only then that we actually approach nodes of real historical/contemporary accomplishment. The problem, however, is that the process of triangulation required to create a point of access to such accomplishment is exceedingly difficult to carry out when it comes to making art, especially by anyone exercising wholly rational judgment. Rather, it is when a grand vision comes together with mechanisms of subconscious desire, various implicit capacities, painful labor, and moments of concentration that verge on joy, that a magical alchemical reaction results, finally, in the actualization of artistic delusion.
Between 2015 and 2017, as a student at Kyung Hee University, Rhee Donghoon explored a range of subject matter and techniques in his work. In the rush to establish a conceptual and poetic methodology, however, Rhee came to doubt his own creative acts and intentions — and this doubt, in its turn, became the impetus for a return to his point of origin, a fresh start. In 2019, Rhee embarked upon his ongoing flower vase series, exploring the painterly potential of sculpture much as a painter of old might return to the flower vase and try their hand at an experimental still life in order to begin their artistic practice anew.
* * *
The flower; the vase: among contemporary artists, neither are considered with particular reverence as subjects of study. A general appreciation for its structural characteristics notwithstanding, true painterly reinventions of the flower, for example, have been exceedingly rare. Even Claude Monet (1840-1926) chose to disregard the specific attributes of the flowers he painted, failing to leave behind even a single notable still life. Paul Cezanne (1839-1906), on the other hand, first began making his name with still lifes, ultimately producing around twenty fine floral still life paintings. (Though it is worth noting that his greatest still lifes tend to concern themselves with apples rather than flowers.) In the history of early modern art, Odilon Redon’s (1840-19116) flower vase paintings are relatively well known — though these, too, never quite rise to the level of true masterpieces.
The best flowers painted by any modern artist are by Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890). Not only did van Gogh make a surprisingly thorough study of his subject (the flower), he never allowed the formative order of the larger painting to subsume its individual characteristics — so much so that any van Gogh flower painting that fails to accurately capture the plant’s specificity can be considered a forgery. Henri Matisse (1869-1954) and Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) also produced some flower still lifes, but not many. Meanwhile Georges Braque (1882-1963), who rejected modernism’s progression to return to historicism in the wake of World War I, produced a steady stream of floral still lifes. Encountered today, his technique — a peculiar mode in which genre painting techniques of the past are given more gestural expression — feels almost post-modern.
In this light, the various flower series of Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986) are quite exceptional, and “The Dinner Party” (1974-1979), the response to O’Keeffe by Judy Chicago (1939-) and various colleagues, is also downright extraordinary. These full dinner settings of sculpted flowers and genitalia in bas relief and high relief stand as a “beautiful failure” in the quest for a truly female monument, remarkable to this day in its singularity.
East German painter Gerhard Richter (1932-) famously scorned his flower-painting peers at art school in West Germany. In the 1970s, however, he, too, added three flower panels to his “Atlas” series (1962-2013); and after producing a photo painting of a flower in 1977, he went on to create four more between 1992 and 1994. All of these flower photo paintings are a part of Richter’s critical response to American photorealism.
The flowers of Andy Warhol and Sturtevant are, of course, so well known that they require no separate explanation, while Roy Lichtenstein’s floral still lifes remain stuck at the level of referential pastiche. So if we are to turn to floral sculpture, then, which modern artists might await us?
Picasso himself produced a rather cute series of flower vase sculptures. “Flowers in a Vase (Fleurs dans un vase)” (1951-1953) is a combination of terracotta vase with metal core and plaster, though there are versions out there cast in bronze with a patina wash as well. In no way could this work be considered a masterpiece. Now Claes Oldenburg (1929-), on the other hand, recently produced and unveiled a very impressive floral work. Begun as a collaboration with his wife, the art historian Coosje van Bruggen (1942-2009), before her death, “Dropped Bouquet” (2021) presents a distinctly American surrealism, testifying to the scope and nature of Jeff Koons’s influence.
Meanwhile, though one would think that Niki de Saint Phalle (1930-2002) must have constructed a gargantuan monster flower sculpture at some point, all she left behind were sketches. The actual monster-flowers and gargantuan flower sculptures we now have are those by Yayoi Kusama (1929-), Tetsumi Kudo (1935-1990), Isa Genzken (1948-), and Choi Jeong Hwa (1961-). There are no large-scale versions of Jeff Koons’s flower sculptures either, though his “Large Vase of Flowers” (1991) can be considered his representative work in the category as a whole.
Notable exceptions include Sofu Teshigahara (1900-1979) and his works of “sogetsu ikebana,” the avant-garde flower arranging methodology practiced in accordance with the motto “Anytime, Anywhere, by Anyone,”and Yoshihiro Suda (1969-), whose precise and delicate painted wood flowers take inspiration from ancient Japanese woodworking traditions.
Even if one were to gather every one of the representative flower paintings and sculptures of modern art mentioned above, however, the resulting exhibition would fall short of greatness. The subject of the flower, when all is said and done, is simply inadequate to the task of encompassing the major developments of modern art.
* * *
Having chosen the flower vase as the subject with which to make his fresh start, Rhee Donghoon — much like German expressionist painter Emil Nolde (1867-1956) or even Picasso in his proto-cubist period — contemplated the object in question, then transformed and recreated (“nachschaffen”) it through that process of contemplation, producing an initial series of painted sculptures wholly in keeping with the major premises of 20th century modern art writ large. Through the labor intensive process of carving and trimming the wood toward the desired expression, along with a painting process designed to preserve the original property of the wood, the artist rediscovered a sense of pleasure in his practice. Thanks to the restrictions of the material and his own ignorance in the field of sculpture, Rhee was able to cast off both the practical and conceptual limitations of longstanding habit that had so hobbled his paintings. The act of painting on the material and form of the roughly sculpted wood led Rhee in a different direction from his previous practice of painting on more traditional surfaces. Now the application of color could result in a clearer delineation between extant fields, or the creation of a new distinction altogether, or even the complete concealment of any and all such boundaries, as if they had never been. Indeed, each time this color is added to the sculptural form, the contour of the painted area raises an interesting issue. Through bringing the off-kilter balance between sculptural form and color into a state of relative harmony, the artist comes to understand that there is both a way forward to a referential new abstraction and to a non-representational new conception.
Interestingly, as a painterly sculptor, whenever Rhee Donghoon does not care to semanticize a given form, he tends to summon a cat, or a bird, or a snake. Known to have a penchant for looking after stray cats in his day to day, the artist believes that cats, as objects of his affection, will resist effortful interpretation as linkages of great art historical significance, and prevent the formation of some overreaching conceptual allegory. Flower vases and cats, after all, are almost entirely empty signifiers; they are something close to memes — and not just any memes, but memes past their prime, from the lost age of Tumblr. Still, these are the forms that have allowed the artist to ease his own mind of pressure, and find more enjoyment in his own artistic practice.
In keeping with the national sentiment and outlook, a labor intensive artistic process is often a source of great satisfaction and pride for Korean artists. Indeed, some say such long hours of dedicated concentration can even deliver one unto a unity of the ego with the outside world, of form free of thought. Of course, while there are artists who speak of freedom from both form and thought, there is in practice no art that can achieve such a state. (A possible variation being, perhaps, art that breaks form and quiets thought.) The clear-sighted artist seeks and cleaves to the model of art that is form without thought, but this can actually be difficult to distinguish from the category of thought without form. (I myself have a fondness for those in the business of art as empty conceptual abstraction/empty emotional construction and variations thereof.) In any event, anyone who has pursued a truly labor intensive artistic process — even those without any experience of disciplining mind and body in an explicitly religious context, and atheists who place the ideal of rational thought before all else — will develop an understanding of how such a practice both empties and gathers the self in such a way as to help establish a state of steady quietude in mind and body. The danger here is when an artist grows addicted to this experience, as this can take a toll on their physical health. In Rhee’s case, too, there are definite signs and phenomena that point to just such a growing addiction to his own labor intensive process.
Rhee Donghoon’s painted wooden sculptures are paragons of “forms reaching for abstraction, arrived at through a process of concentrated devotion.” At the same time, they also have a kind of distinct style that feels entirely new, creating a rather peculiar impact. Certain aspects of their appearance call to mind the neo-expressionist sculptures of artists like Georg Baselitz (1938-), while others seem almost to assert an unwitting succession to the few sculptural Blue Horse studies of Franz Marc (1880-1916). (Let us, for a moment, imagine what might have happened if Franz Marc had survived both world wars and developed his sculptural practice, adding to it his singular use of color.)
At the same time, Rhee’s wooden works also have the kind of “big, savory flavor” that could be said to define (Korea’s) “21st century folk art,” not to mention a “non-religious yet sacred” spirit of contemporary animism. While the connections made by a person will vary widely between individuals, the first time I ever saw Rhee Donghoon’s work I was reminded of the Mokujiki Buddhas so industriously studied and collected by the scholar Yanagi Sōetsu, or even the Enkū Buddhas that predate them. (Imagine if someone were to produce a 21st century Enkū Buddha, only with the addition of color — what singular beauty might be realized by such an object?)
For most of these pieces, the artist purchased nut pines that measured 3 meters and 60 centimeters in height directly from a lumber mill, either working with them whole or cutting them down to a more manageable size. Each such log costs some 250 thousand won, plus an extra 50 thousand won for delivery. (There is also one piece made from the wood of a zelkova tree that was gifted to the artist by Professor Kim Seil, a sculptor in his own right, but we are told that this wood was so hard that the artist strained his wrist while working with it.) The color in these pieces was added in acrylic paint.
Rhee’s first solo show, held in October of 2918 and titled “Room with Flowers” (20191017-1123, Drawing Room) included such wooden works as “Cactus,” “Vase of Magnolias,” “Flower Vase,” “Flower Vase,” “Flamingo and Grass,” and “Cat and Titmouse and Grass,” among others. Sculptures by a young artist who had been trained as a painter, these pieces simultaneously showcased Rhee’s attempt to “overcome his own limitations through embracing the unfamiliar technique of sculpture” while also combining contemporary sculpture and painting in such a way as to effectively, and undeniably, radiate that “big, savory flavor”— and, in so doing, achieving something close to an ultra-vernacular aesthetic.
The issue, here, is the paintings. In the process of taking his own completed sculptures as model/object and committing them to paint and canvas, the artist falls back into old habits. And the instinct toward dutiful reproduction, that most classic mode of art school art, results in a kind of rubbish that marks a stark contrast to the achievement of the painted wood sculptures. Where the painted wood pieces lay claim to a true organic autonomy, establishing a sense of totemic presence as semi-living beings, the paintings that take these pieces as their models/objects present as mere portraits, unremarkable. By all rights, these paintings should have been still lifes that captured the contemporary gaze — but by any standard they are simply old fashioned portraits.
Recall that Cezanne’s figure paintings and landscapes were, in fact, still lifes, and Rhee’s misstep becomes clear. Only after the genre of the still life had provided an avenue for the full realization of the binocular perspective, thus breaking through the illustrative limitations of the monocular perspective, was Cezanne truly able to embark upon a steady march of progressive achievement via landscape and figure painting. The fact that Cezanne, through the visually responsive layering of tactile brushstrokes in his “Large Bathers” series, created an entirely new kind of painting that is now considered to be the inception of modern art, can be seen as a direct progenitor of Rodin’s layering of a process of tactile modeling in “The Gates of Hell,” now considered to be the inception of modern sculpture. As such, Rhee Donghoon, in terms of the very opposite in influence, ought now to dream up a new kind of painting derived from the work of Rodin in the 1900s, placing his emphasis on the process and means of production.
* * *
Having graduated from Seoul National University of Science and Technology’s graduate school in the Department of Formative Arts in August of 2021 with a Master of Arts dissertation titled “Between Material and Expression,” Rhee Donghoon has steadily established a name for himself with his painted wooden sculptures — though, again, the paintings that then took these sculptures as their subject were repeatedly less than successful. This continued to be the case until quite recently.
Moving on from still life sculpture, the artist began trying his hand at figurative sculpture in early 2021, taking as his new subject the forms and dance moves of various K-Pop idols. This presented a new challenge: the work of capturing the human body and its movements required an entirely different approach to analysis than the study of any motionless object. And indeed, unlike his previous still life sculptures, these sculptural representations of the human form, first shown in April of 2021 as part of a group show titled “Human Shape Materials” (20210417-0508, Lala&), initially strugged to achieve a truly organic autonomy.
Still, it did not take Rhee long to overcome this limitation. The idol sculptures exhibited at his second solo exhibition, “The Statue Knows How to Dance” (20210708-0731, Gallery SP), seem almost like colorful 21st century Enkū Buddhas in their own right, rendering incarnate the existence of these K-Pop stars in place of Siddhartha Gautama. Interesting, too, is the fact that these pieces also strive to capture movement. The dance of the K-Pop idol, after all, is not meant for the theater stage. These dances are choreographed for the screen, to best suit the circumscribed perspectives of the camera. Indeed, even when these dances are sometimes adapted to be performed live in concert, the fans in the audience are already well practiced at adopting the (semi-)omniscient gaze of the studio camera themselves in order to take in the show. So given this, then, how is today’s artist to take such a dance, “choreographed from its very conception toward a re-processing via specific media,” and successfully translate it into what we are calling a semi-autonomous formative order?
If we consider the way the Fauvists followed in the wake of Cezanne, followed by the Cubists, who were in turn followed by the Futurists, it is possible to hazard a guess at the potential breadth of experimental variations that may develop from Rhee Donghoon’s idol sculptures. There is, in short, much still left to be done. When one opens the door to figurative sculpture, then it is only a matter of time before one must try one’s hand at groups of figures, like “Les Bourgeois de Calais” (1884-1889), and of incomplete synthesis, like “La Porte de l’Enfer” (1880-1917).
By a similar token, the new paintings in this, Rhee’s second solo show, appear to have broken through the limitations of his previous portraiture. In (re)considering his own completed sculptures of the human form from multiple different vantage points, he has produced a series of semi-abstract paintings that bring them into two dimensions, a plane of irreproducible multi-perspective. These canvases of swift, careless brush strokes cast off the habit of reproducing monocular perspective and accomplish the accumulation of an actively dynamic trajectory. At last, the artist is successful in turning studied movement into the basis for a dynamic stationary object (though of course this is, by definition, a contradiction in terms), producing the kind of semi-autonomous paintings that seem capable of endless expansion: painterly sculptures and sculptural paintings, finally arrived at a state of tilted equilibrium. ///
Postscript) The painted sculptures of Rhee Donghoon must be taken further still in terms of the study of motion and perspectival accumulation, and the sculptural paintings derived from them must evolve in the direction of either expansion into the realm of multiple perspectives or into even starker relief. Indeed, I hope eventually to see, possibly many decades from now, a scene of painting and sculpture in full mutual interconnection.
Postscript 2) Recalling that modern/contemporary Korean culture is shot through with “off-kilter balance” and “the dynamic of collision and dissonance,” these latest works by Rhee Donghoon stand as the art of the Korean ultra-vernacular — as, in other words, instances of 21st century trans-folk art. Of course, the intimation here is that these pieces are not, then, contemporary art. This may sound like an insult to some, but the fact is, all art need not be contemporary art. After all, even if contemporary art and the contemporary art world meet their ruin, works of non-contemporary art (and, indeed, artifacts) that coalesce a singular point of view and depth of feeling will always, somehow, survive — and in so doing prove their own value.
The sculptures of Rhee Donghoon (1991-) are axiomatic. They are axiomatic on multiple fronts. And the act of critiquing work that is axiomatic can be, at times, a senseless undertaking, slipping into tautology. Still, there are ways in which such repetition reveals difference, and this, in turn, can lead both to interest and to meaningful play.
The paintings of Rhee Donghoon, on the other hand, are not axiomatic. At least, they have not been so far. This is because something remains — something in the objective or the process of the work itself — that ultimately elides elucidation. Even those of his paintings derived from his sculpture, which do have a clarity of orientation, are still ambiguous in terms of identity. As such, these incomplete canvases, reduced into an aspect of ostensible “completion,” can feel almost like adolescents still in the process of socialization. By this same token, however, these paintings are also able to return a “nontrivial dynamism” to the sculptures themselves. And at this point, of course, this is all still the story of a beginning, a positing of possible near-futures.
Reviewing an artistic world only now coming into its own can be a rather futile exercise. Such futile exercises can be good and they can be bad. For the artistic world of a young man to grow in directions that depart from that which was once captured — or predicted — on the page, is not only to be expected but to be desired. Though this is not to say that such growth is always a given. Indeed, there have been cases where the critic’s intellectual play, presented as excessive hypotheses and exposition, is taken not as a springboard to leap in new directions but as a kind of guide for where to go next: an extremely discouraging scenario. The you who emerged in my writing, after all, was never the actual you.
In truth, any critique that explicates a full accounting of an artist’s work, beginning to end, can harm the works still to come. If a specific work, for example, is comprehended as “pathosformel,” then that work will always appear to hold something more than the emotions of the artist himself. The emotions of the contemporary age permeate such works, soaked in through the artist’s subconscious and practice, even as the artist’s own conventional actions, modalities, and symbolic variations result in a gradual accumulation of historical sentiment. For such an artist’s artistic world to slip naturally into the time and space of the unknown, the discourse and the work must miss one another by an (in)appropriate degree. It is the (semi-)autonomous work, running from the artist’s own written statement, that leads the artist and their artistic world toward a kind of magical growth. Few things, after all, are as boring as those works that simply give shape to an original intention as-is, having undergone a process carried out by a whole, sound mind in accordance with a plan laid out by that same whole, sound mind. Happily, Rhee Donghoon’s works tend to stray quite far from the artist’s original plans and language. The question of just how much awareness the artist himself has of the potential inherent in this state of affairs may prove to be crucial, moving forward; or it may not matter at all. Indeed, there are times when the work itself uses the artist as the vehicle for realizing its own potential.
Any artistic world that manifests an organic system through the artist seeks an abstract form that corresponds to the true nature of its existence. And while the actual form of the specific figure of manifestation may vary, the outline remains constant — so long as the artist does not resist the reason of the organic system and its flow.
Though there are intergenerational inherited objectives from which form can be inferred and realized when any auto-organic system begins to coalesce, we also see further variation and realization in terms of shape, as determined by the activity and necessary situational purpose of each work. As such, figures rendered material according to given periods of work appear in keeping with their existential objective as objects, shaped in accordance with the direction of their chronological evolution; it is only then that we actually approach nodes of real historical/contemporary accomplishment. The problem, however, is that the process of triangulation required to create a point of access to such accomplishment is exceedingly difficult to carry out when it comes to making art, especially by anyone exercising wholly rational judgment. Rather, it is when a grand vision comes together with mechanisms of subconscious desire, various implicit capacities, painful labor, and moments of concentration that verge on joy, that a magical alchemical reaction results, finally, in the actualization of artistic delusion.
Between 2015 and 2017, as a student at Kyung Hee University, Rhee Donghoon explored a range of subject matter and techniques in his work. In the rush to establish a conceptual and poetic methodology, however, Rhee came to doubt his own creative acts and intentions — and this doubt, in its turn, became the impetus for a return to his point of origin, a fresh start. In 2019, Rhee embarked upon his ongoing flower vase series, exploring the painterly potential of sculpture much as a painter of old might return to the flower vase and try their hand at an experimental still life in order to begin their artistic practice anew.
* * *
The flower; the vase: among contemporary artists, neither are considered with particular reverence as subjects of study. A general appreciation for its structural characteristics notwithstanding, true painterly reinventions of the flower, for example, have been exceedingly rare. Even Claude Monet (1840-1926) chose to disregard the specific attributes of the flowers he painted, failing to leave behind even a single notable still life. Paul Cezanne (1839-1906), on the other hand, first began making his name with still lifes, ultimately producing around twenty fine floral still life paintings. (Though it is worth noting that his greatest still lifes tend to concern themselves with apples rather than flowers.) In the history of early modern art, Odilon Redon’s (1840-19116) flower vase paintings are relatively well known — though these, too, never quite rise to the level of true masterpieces.
The best flowers painted by any modern artist are by Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890). Not only did van Gogh make a surprisingly thorough study of his subject (the flower), he never allowed the formative order of the larger painting to subsume its individual characteristics — so much so that any van Gogh flower painting that fails to accurately capture the plant’s specificity can be considered a forgery. Henri Matisse (1869-1954) and Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) also produced some flower still lifes, but not many. Meanwhile Georges Braque (1882-1963), who rejected modernism’s progression to return to historicism in the wake of World War I, produced a steady stream of floral still lifes. Encountered today, his technique — a peculiar mode in which genre painting techniques of the past are given more gestural expression — feels almost post-modern.
In this light, the various flower series of Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986) are quite exceptional, and “The Dinner Party” (1974-1979), the response to O’Keeffe by Judy Chicago (1939-) and various colleagues, is also downright extraordinary. These full dinner settings of sculpted flowers and genitalia in bas relief and high relief stand as a “beautiful failure” in the quest for a truly female monument, remarkable to this day in its singularity.
East German painter Gerhard Richter (1932-) famously scorned his flower-painting peers at art school in West Germany. In the 1970s, however, he, too, added three flower panels to his “Atlas” series (1962-2013); and after producing a photo painting of a flower in 1977, he went on to create four more between 1992 and 1994. All of these flower photo paintings are a part of Richter’s critical response to American photorealism.
The flowers of Andy Warhol and Sturtevant are, of course, so well known that they require no separate explanation, while Roy Lichtenstein’s floral still lifes remain stuck at the level of referential pastiche. So if we are to turn to floral sculpture, then, which modern artists might await us?
Picasso himself produced a rather cute series of flower vase sculptures. “Flowers in a Vase (Fleurs dans un vase)” (1951-1953) is a combination of terracotta vase with metal core and plaster, though there are versions out there cast in bronze with a patina wash as well. In no way could this work be considered a masterpiece. Now Claes Oldenburg (1929-), on the other hand, recently produced and unveiled a very impressive floral work. Begun as a collaboration with his wife, the art historian Coosje van Bruggen (1942-2009), before her death, “Dropped Bouquet” (2021) presents a distinctly American surrealism, testifying to the scope and nature of Jeff Koons’s influence.
Meanwhile, though one would think that Niki de Saint Phalle (1930-2002) must have constructed a gargantuan monster flower sculpture at some point, all she left behind were sketches. The actual monster-flowers and gargantuan flower sculptures we now have are those by Yayoi Kusama (1929-), Tetsumi Kudo (1935-1990), Isa Genzken (1948-), and Choi Jeong Hwa (1961-). There are no large-scale versions of Jeff Koons’s flower sculptures either, though his “Large Vase of Flowers” (1991) can be considered his representative work in the category as a whole.
Notable exceptions include Sofu Teshigahara (1900-1979) and his works of “sogetsu ikebana,” the avant-garde flower arranging methodology practiced in accordance with the motto “Anytime, Anywhere, by Anyone,”and Yoshihiro Suda (1969-), whose precise and delicate painted wood flowers take inspiration from ancient Japanese woodworking traditions.
Even if one were to gather every one of the representative flower paintings and sculptures of modern art mentioned above, however, the resulting exhibition would fall short of greatness. The subject of the flower, when all is said and done, is simply inadequate to the task of encompassing the major developments of modern art.
* * *
Having chosen the flower vase as the subject with which to make his fresh start, Rhee Donghoon — much like German expressionist painter Emil Nolde (1867-1956) or even Picasso in his proto-cubist period — contemplated the object in question, then transformed and recreated (“nachschaffen”) it through that process of contemplation, producing an initial series of painted sculptures wholly in keeping with the major premises of 20th century modern art writ large. Through the labor intensive process of carving and trimming the wood toward the desired expression, along with a painting process designed to preserve the original property of the wood, the artist rediscovered a sense of pleasure in his practice. Thanks to the restrictions of the material and his own ignorance in the field of sculpture, Rhee was able to cast off both the practical and conceptual limitations of longstanding habit that had so hobbled his paintings. The act of painting on the material and form of the roughly sculpted wood led Rhee in a different direction from his previous practice of painting on more traditional surfaces. Now the application of color could result in a clearer delineation between extant fields, or the creation of a new distinction altogether, or even the complete concealment of any and all such boundaries, as if they had never been. Indeed, each time this color is added to the sculptural form, the contour of the painted area raises an interesting issue. Through bringing the off-kilter balance between sculptural form and color into a state of relative harmony, the artist comes to understand that there is both a way forward to a referential new abstraction and to a non-representational new conception.
Interestingly, as a painterly sculptor, whenever Rhee Donghoon does not care to semanticize a given form, he tends to summon a cat, or a bird, or a snake. Known to have a penchant for looking after stray cats in his day to day, the artist believes that cats, as objects of his affection, will resist effortful interpretation as linkages of great art historical significance, and prevent the formation of some overreaching conceptual allegory. Flower vases and cats, after all, are almost entirely empty signifiers; they are something close to memes — and not just any memes, but memes past their prime, from the lost age of Tumblr. Still, these are the forms that have allowed the artist to ease his own mind of pressure, and find more enjoyment in his own artistic practice.
In keeping with the national sentiment and outlook, a labor intensive artistic process is often a source of great satisfaction and pride for Korean artists. Indeed, some say such long hours of dedicated concentration can even deliver one unto a unity of the ego with the outside world, of form free of thought. Of course, while there are artists who speak of freedom from both form and thought, there is in practice no art that can achieve such a state. (A possible variation being, perhaps, art that breaks form and quiets thought.) The clear-sighted artist seeks and cleaves to the model of art that is form without thought, but this can actually be difficult to distinguish from the category of thought without form. (I myself have a fondness for those in the business of art as empty conceptual abstraction/empty emotional construction and variations thereof.) In any event, anyone who has pursued a truly labor intensive artistic process — even those without any experience of disciplining mind and body in an explicitly religious context, and atheists who place the ideal of rational thought before all else — will develop an understanding of how such a practice both empties and gathers the self in such a way as to help establish a state of steady quietude in mind and body. The danger here is when an artist grows addicted to this experience, as this can take a toll on their physical health. In Rhee’s case, too, there are definite signs and phenomena that point to just such a growing addiction to his own labor intensive process.
Rhee Donghoon’s painted wooden sculptures are paragons of “forms reaching for abstraction, arrived at through a process of concentrated devotion.” At the same time, they also have a kind of distinct style that feels entirely new, creating a rather peculiar impact. Certain aspects of their appearance call to mind the neo-expressionist sculptures of artists like Georg Baselitz (1938-), while others seem almost to assert an unwitting succession to the few sculptural Blue Horse studies of Franz Marc (1880-1916). (Let us, for a moment, imagine what might have happened if Franz Marc had survived both world wars and developed his sculptural practice, adding to it his singular use of color.)
At the same time, Rhee’s wooden works also have the kind of “big, savory flavor” that could be said to define (Korea’s) “21st century folk art,” not to mention a “non-religious yet sacred” spirit of contemporary animism. While the connections made by a person will vary widely between individuals, the first time I ever saw Rhee Donghoon’s work I was reminded of the Mokujiki Buddhas so industriously studied and collected by the scholar Yanagi Sōetsu, or even the Enkū Buddhas that predate them. (Imagine if someone were to produce a 21st century Enkū Buddha, only with the addition of color — what singular beauty might be realized by such an object?)
For most of these pieces, the artist purchased nut pines that measured 3 meters and 60 centimeters in height directly from a lumber mill, either working with them whole or cutting them down to a more manageable size. Each such log costs some 250 thousand won, plus an extra 50 thousand won for delivery. (There is also one piece made from the wood of a zelkova tree that was gifted to the artist by Professor Kim Seil, a sculptor in his own right, but we are told that this wood was so hard that the artist strained his wrist while working with it.) The color in these pieces was added in acrylic paint.
Rhee’s first solo show, held in October of 2918 and titled “Room with Flowers” (20191017-1123, Drawing Room) included such wooden works as “Cactus,” “Vase of Magnolias,” “Flower Vase,” “Flower Vase,” “Flamingo and Grass,” and “Cat and Titmouse and Grass,” among others. Sculptures by a young artist who had been trained as a painter, these pieces simultaneously showcased Rhee’s attempt to “overcome his own limitations through embracing the unfamiliar technique of sculpture” while also combining contemporary sculpture and painting in such a way as to effectively, and undeniably, radiate that “big, savory flavor”— and, in so doing, achieving something close to an ultra-vernacular aesthetic.
The issue, here, is the paintings. In the process of taking his own completed sculptures as model/object and committing them to paint and canvas, the artist falls back into old habits. And the instinct toward dutiful reproduction, that most classic mode of art school art, results in a kind of rubbish that marks a stark contrast to the achievement of the painted wood sculptures. Where the painted wood pieces lay claim to a true organic autonomy, establishing a sense of totemic presence as semi-living beings, the paintings that take these pieces as their models/objects present as mere portraits, unremarkable. By all rights, these paintings should have been still lifes that captured the contemporary gaze — but by any standard they are simply old fashioned portraits.
Recall that Cezanne’s figure paintings and landscapes were, in fact, still lifes, and Rhee’s misstep becomes clear. Only after the genre of the still life had provided an avenue for the full realization of the binocular perspective, thus breaking through the illustrative limitations of the monocular perspective, was Cezanne truly able to embark upon a steady march of progressive achievement via landscape and figure painting. The fact that Cezanne, through the visually responsive layering of tactile brushstrokes in his “Large Bathers” series, created an entirely new kind of painting that is now considered to be the inception of modern art, can be seen as a direct progenitor of Rodin’s layering of a process of tactile modeling in “The Gates of Hell,” now considered to be the inception of modern sculpture. As such, Rhee Donghoon, in terms of the very opposite in influence, ought now to dream up a new kind of painting derived from the work of Rodin in the 1900s, placing his emphasis on the process and means of production.
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Having graduated from Seoul National University of Science and Technology’s graduate school in the Department of Formative Arts in August of 2021 with a Master of Arts dissertation titled “Between Material and Expression,” Rhee Donghoon has steadily established a name for himself with his painted wooden sculptures — though, again, the paintings that then took these sculptures as their subject were repeatedly less than successful. This continued to be the case until quite recently.
Moving on from still life sculpture, the artist began trying his hand at figurative sculpture in early 2021, taking as his new subject the forms and dance moves of various K-Pop idols. This presented a new challenge: the work of capturing the human body and its movements required an entirely different approach to analysis than the study of any motionless object. And indeed, unlike his previous still life sculptures, these sculptural representations of the human form, first shown in April of 2021 as part of a group show titled “Human Shape Materials” (20210417-0508, Lala&), initially strugged to achieve a truly organic autonomy.
Still, it did not take Rhee long to overcome this limitation. The idol sculptures exhibited at his second solo exhibition, “The Statue Knows How to Dance” (20210708-0731, Gallery SP), seem almost like colorful 21st century Enkū Buddhas in their own right, rendering incarnate the existence of these K-Pop stars in place of Siddhartha Gautama. Interesting, too, is the fact that these pieces also strive to capture movement. The dance of the K-Pop idol, after all, is not meant for the theater stage. These dances are choreographed for the screen, to best suit the circumscribed perspectives of the camera. Indeed, even when these dances are sometimes adapted to be performed live in concert, the fans in the audience are already well practiced at adopting the (semi-)omniscient gaze of the studio camera themselves in order to take in the show. So given this, then, how is today’s artist to take such a dance, “choreographed from its very conception toward a re-processing via specific media,” and successfully translate it into what we are calling a semi-autonomous formative order?
If we consider the way the Fauvists followed in the wake of Cezanne, followed by the Cubists, who were in turn followed by the Futurists, it is possible to hazard a guess at the potential breadth of experimental variations that may develop from Rhee Donghoon’s idol sculptures. There is, in short, much still left to be done. When one opens the door to figurative sculpture, then it is only a matter of time before one must try one’s hand at groups of figures, like “Les Bourgeois de Calais” (1884-1889), and of incomplete synthesis, like “La Porte de l’Enfer” (1880-1917).
By a similar token, the new paintings in this, Rhee’s second solo show, appear to have broken through the limitations of his previous portraiture. In (re)considering his own completed sculptures of the human form from multiple different vantage points, he has produced a series of semi-abstract paintings that bring them into two dimensions, a plane of irreproducible multi-perspective. These canvases of swift, careless brush strokes cast off the habit of reproducing monocular perspective and accomplish the accumulation of an actively dynamic trajectory. At last, the artist is successful in turning studied movement into the basis for a dynamic stationary object (though of course this is, by definition, a contradiction in terms), producing the kind of semi-autonomous paintings that seem capable of endless expansion: painterly sculptures and sculptural paintings, finally arrived at a state of tilted equilibrium. ///
Postscript) The painted sculptures of Rhee Donghoon must be taken further still in terms of the study of motion and perspectival accumulation, and the sculptural paintings derived from them must evolve in the direction of either expansion into the realm of multiple perspectives or into even starker relief. Indeed, I hope eventually to see, possibly many decades from now, a scene of painting and sculpture in full mutual interconnection.
Postscript 2) Recalling that modern/contemporary Korean culture is shot through with “off-kilter balance” and “the dynamic of collision and dissonance,” these latest works by Rhee Donghoon stand as the art of the Korean ultra-vernacular — as, in other words, instances of 21st century trans-folk art. Of course, the intimation here is that these pieces are not, then, contemporary art. This may sound like an insult to some, but the fact is, all art need not be contemporary art. After all, even if contemporary art and the contemporary art world meet their ruin, works of non-contemporary art (and, indeed, artifacts) that coalesce a singular point of view and depth of feeling will always, somehow, survive — and in so doing prove their own value.