Color is always of prime importance when it occurs in bulk. The effect of some green here and a little red there is, as right and important this distribution may be in a special case, rather limited in comparison to the massive orange in Leighton's "Flaming June" or the blue in the paintings of Tschoon Su KIM. His concentration on blue results in a paradox: The more you focus on the blue the more you learn about the other colors. Noticing their absence you realize that they are not needed. This is amplified by the fact that the blue is not opaque, rather it is in constant dialogue with the white background of the image. White as the sum of all colors revokes the necessity of any other color than the one present.
That is no linguistic trick, but aesthetic need in the painting; a necessity which, however, is only slave to the logic and nature of the picture.
We meet the dialogue between the blue and the white ground as painterly form.
Sometime we confront dynamic all-over-structures, dissolving the surface into a dance of color gestures, whose movements, however, extend beyond the pictorial confines and embrace space as a whole, lastly, life as a whole. At other times there may be an opening in space, which, in turn, will redefine the color treatment as planary, or there are compactions as sometimes shadowy, difficult to grasp quasi pictorial figures, which, if repeatedly present, render a higher-level, heuristically fruitful pictorial structure. The aesthetic experiences transforming themselves into recognition and the resulting embedding of the viewer into a all-embracing artistic process define just this process. That is a kind of aesthetic reconstruction, as the image reconstructs its coming into being and says so.
The color blue, usually said to be soothing and calm, is redefined by Tschoon Su KIM . The energetic and gestural application of paint with sometimes marked internal structures is expressive and impulsive in a controlled way, but not as an expression of a tortured self, rather of the creative spirit; a gestural abstraction, a variant of action painting: The energy of the performance is communicated to the viewer, who realizes that they are manifest. Aesthetically, KIM lives in a painterly cosmos of blue, which, to us, is a likeness of the cosmos and its harmony. That is meaningful indeed.
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by Gerhard Charles Rump
Translation: Mason Ellis Murray
