Jinmo KANG

A Game of Mirrors - Yin and Yang

The Tao that can be told
is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named
is not the eternal name.

Tao Te Ching - Chapter 1

'Man is by nature a cultural being' wrote Arnold Gehlen in his book Man, his Nature and Place in the World. As a being of culture, he is outside the equilibrium of nature; he is its counterpart. Man forms nature according to his ideas, uses it as material and as a resource. From this he creates his own realm, the realm of culture, the realm of art.

'Man is by nature a cultural being' wrote Arnold Gehlen in his book Man, his Nature and Place in the World. As a being of culture, he is outside the equilibrium of nature; he is its counterpart. Man forms nature according to his ideas, uses it as material and as a resource. From this he creates his own realm, the realm of culture, the realm of art.

These are the seemingly opposing principles: nature on the one hand and art on the other. The Greek philosophers called it physis and techné, yin and yang the Chinese.

The Korean artist Jinmo Kang is a past master at this game between nature and art, between that which is given and that which is made. Man, Jinmo Kang once explained in an interview, sees himself as the master of nature. However, nothing man can make can equal the perfection and beauty nature is capable of. It is thus with great respect for the power and beauty of nature that Jinmo Kang creates his installations and sculptures.

Margit Biedermann and Jinmo Kang have known each other for decades. The collector visited his studio as early as the 1990s, when the artist was still working in Munich and had recently completed his studies. Over the years collector and artist have formed a firm friendship that has led to a close artistic cooperation. For the opening of Museum Biedermann in 2009 Jinmo Kang created two outdoor sculptures that remain an integral part of the museum ensemble. These 'nature portraits' are among the favourite pieces of the visitors. The artist planted a cherry tree in front of the museum and juxtaposed it with a life-size tree portrait in stainless steel. For Jinmo Kang the tree is an individual to whom he pays homage in the form of a portrait, just as he would for a person. Climbing through the tree, the artist measured every branch, the angle of every fork and recreated them to scale in gleaming rustproof metal. 'I was happy,' he wrote, 'to feel one with nature. Perhaps it was not a good idea to descend from that paradise.'

His portrait does not just pay homage to the beauty of nature; for the artist the tree is a metaphor for an existential equilibrium: 'Since the expulsion from paradise, life (…) is a struggle against gravity. The tree shows us the way: To survive this struggle, everything depends on the proportion of length to thickness.'

Not far from the tree lies another portrait of nature: a large framework of stainless steel tubing which portrays a boulder that marks the boundary between the museum grounds and the park. And that is not all. The series is continued inside the museum with an upside-down crown of a tree resting on a support of strong truncated branches, a cephalopod ready to go. Cut-down, bleached and stripped of its bark, this piece of wood still conveys the force and beauty of nature with striking immediacy. Once again, the artist pairs the natural object with a manmade counterpart, this time made of mirrored glass. The effect of these mirror portraits is astounding. They stand beside their real-life models like supernatural apparitions, like visions, like dreams or ideas of the object.

This disturbing effect of the portraits is especially notable in the installation Stag & Antlers. It consists of a wooden chainsaw-carved deer looking up in surprise and beholding the vision of its antlers in mirrored glass hanging on the wall - a macabre presentiment of things to come or a reversed vision of St Hubert?

Jinmo Kang and I had a brief exchange of emails about this work, and it turned out that he approached it from an entirely different angle. In his email he wrote: 'What I thought of was life and death, (…) power and gender, the weaker sex and the antlers, manliness as such; however, tough rule is so lifeless, it does not even have the guts to abdicate of its own accord.'

The Tao is an empty vessel;
it is used, but never filled.
Oh, unfathomable source of ten thousand things!

Tao Te Ching - Chapter 4

Yin and yang, the given and the created. These fundamental opposites also determine Jinmo Kang's work in stone. He hews basic geometric shapes from black granite - crosses, stelae, cubes, spheres. As in the nature portraits, the artist juxtaposes two interrelated works. The crosses interlock; a granite sphere turns out to fit inside a hollowed-out cube. With these laconic sculptures the artist wants to highlight fundamental interrelationships. 'The yin-yang theory, a key theme of my work, was developed to be able to explain the infinite world with our limited mental powers,' he wrote. 'Form (yang, culture) emerges from an unhewn block (yin, nature). The yang part and the yin part are placed on top of each other to reflect the mystery of the human psyche.'

Irrespective of their philosophical background, these sculptures are works in which the material is more than just a means for the realisation of the artist's will. The given and the created are in an exact equilibrium. At no point does the artist rise above his material; at no point does the form subjugate the material. Not only does the artist make sure that the direct sensuous force of nature remains perceptible in the structure, the surface or the form of the material, he seeks to reinforce it with each intervention.

Allowing himself to be guided by the big questions of Far Eastern philosophy, Jinmo Kang brings together philosophical depth and the material sensuousness. In his works - in the nature portraits as well as in the stone sculptures - he exploits the irresistible appeal of his materials such as the gleaming, reflective surfaces of the tree and boulder portraits or the mysterious lustre of the black granite from Sweden.

Through the beauty of his art Jinmo Kang shows us the beauty of nature. In his work art and nature do not compete, nor do they merely coexist. Interconnected and interdependent, they give rise to each other in turn.

Visitors wanting to know where they stand in this fascination game of mirrors of nature and culture, of yin and yang, should stand beneath the mirrored tree in the park and look up. They will find themselves in infinite reflections and refractions between leaves and branches, heaven and earth.

Those who know do not talk.
Those who talk do not know.
Keep your mouth closed.
Guard your senses.
Temper your sharpness.
Simplify your problems.
Mask your brightness.
Be at one with the dust of the Earth.
This is primal union.

Tao Te Ching - chapter 56

Tobias Wall

___________________

1 Tao Te Ching, in the translation by Gia-fu Feng and Jane English, The Tao Te Ching, Vintage Books, 1989
2 Gehlen, Arnold, Der Mensch, seine Natur und seine Stellung in der Welt, Frankfurt am Main, 2004, p. 80 (Translated as Man, his Nature and Place in the World), New York, Columbia University Press, 1988)
3 Kang, Jinmo: BaumPortrait (Tree Portrait), unpublished essay, not dated
4 Ibid.
5 Kang, Jinmo: Yin und Yang - Experiment for beyond-3D-Form, unpublished essay, not dated.