The Mood of the Mountain, Lee Choun Hwan’s Inflection Point

 

Not everyone would agree that The Mood of the Mountain series is the best work Lee Choun Hwan has ever produced. As an artist with 40 years of experience, he has created many diverse styles of painting, and opinions and perspectives on art, are even more diverse. However, there would be few objections if The Mood of the Mountain was selected as the work which best allows us to understand Lee’s art. The emergence of The Mood of the Mountain series coincides with the moment that Lee’s art separated into two distinct eras.

 

 

While The Mood of the Mountain inherits the aesthetics that penetrates Lee’s work, it showcases a completely different style from his previous paintings. Born in Wando, situated in the southern tip of South Jeolla Province, Lee Choun Hwan worked on “muk” (black ink) for many years. Growing up learning Chinese literature from his grandfather and calligraphy being a natural progression, Lee’s works centered on ink wash painting for a long time. Today, he produces works using mainly acrylic paint on canvas. It signifies a transition from “Oriental painting” to “Western painting,” and The Mood of the Mountain is the first series he produced using acrylic paint.

 

In Lee Choun Hwan’s works, change is not unfamiliar. Even when he was producing more traditional ink wash paintings prior to The Mood of the Mountain series, Lee’s paintings were constantly evolving. For an artist, change is natural, and true art begins with capturing those subtle changes that are continuously occurring in the artist or in the surrounding environment; and then expressing them. In essence then there is a never-ending flow of ideas. Starting with the “Four Gentlemen” and moving onto traditional ink wash paintings, Lee Choun Hwan perfected his style in this medium and demonstrated his ability to capture non-visual elements of nature, such as sound, by expressing the flow of air with ink bleeding techniques, exhibited at The Sound of Nature exhibition held at Dongduk Art Gallery in 1999.

 

Nevertheless, The Mood of the Mountain is unusual in the sense that it suggests Lee has undergone a much more radical change than the gradual change demonstrated in the previous two decades. The changes in style, first of which was the change in materials, seems to make a clean break with his earlier work. The use of colorful acrylic paints that pile up on the surface, instead of ink that integrates into the background, became his medium of choice. There is also a fundamental change in the way nature is expressed. He no longer tries to present the landscape realistically, and instead he minimizes the detail and expresses a mountain with simplified line and color, entirely different from his previous approach. Furthermore, while his works presented in The Sound of Nature exhibition, just before the release of The Mood of the Mountain, are characterized by the expression of air flow, which adds a dynamic to his paintings; The Mood of the Mountain contains a static atmosphere thereby accentuating the stylistic differences. Looking at his previous ink wash paintings and The Mood of the Mountain series, it seems implausible that they are by the same artist.

 

 

Let's take a closer look at The Mood of the Mountain. What you see is an abstracted mountain landscape with the mountain being presented as a large mass and the details such as trees and rocky valleys omitted entirely or expressed in a very limited way. Traditional Korean painting pursues the “Beauty of Emptiness,” making empty space a potent factor in the composition, whereas Western painting is usually characterized by a display of color and volume that fills the whole canvas. It is a cliche but still a persuasive argument that the empty space contains more than that which is painted, and that is the essence of traditional Korean painting. Lee Choun Hwan’s works before The Mood of the Mountain also followed this doctrine, and the background was left empty to effectively express the depth of the mountain. It seems a logical conclusion that he chose to paint abstract forms when he started using acrylic paint on canvas, which cannot be left blank. There are certain elements that can only be expressed if left out of the painting.

 

Since many elements have been omitted from The Mood of the Mountain, the painting has to be seen as a whole rather than focusing on the details. The first thing that catches the viewer’s eye is the color, and the colors are unusual as they are not just green, as one would expect in mountain or forest scenery, but often blue or red. It can be intuitively understood that this is intended to emphasize the color changes that are dependent on the season or the weather conditions, yet it is far from a “realistic presentation.” It is far removed from the realistic portrayal of nature from his earlier works, and therefore allows the artist to convey their experience of nature differently and perhaps more vividly.

 

The new simplified image has a totally different texture created by layered paint on canvas. Lee’s works have now acquired a different feel, which traditional ink could not produce. The reason an artist may move away from familiar and favored materials and decide to take on the challenge of new mediums, is that he has caught a glimpse of a new territory to explore where it is worth taking the risk. In the case of Lee Choun Hwan, it was a change in color and texture that he needed, and he experimented with different materials to add a different personality to his work. The Mood of the Mountain series encapsulates these changes and allows the artist to achieve his goal: capturing the energy beyond what is visible.

 

 

Despite the changes in material and the method of expression in Lee Choun Hwan’s work, the core goals remain: the expression of things that can be sensed but cannot be traced with the eyes. Ever since he began painting, Lee had been working on what he observed and felt in nature while climbing mountains and strolling beaches, and he had known for a long time that it was not enough just to paint what he saw in order to express his experience of nature. It was one conversation—well-known among people who know Lee—with Dr. Kook Chaeho, an art collector and the dean of the College of Pharmacy, Seoul National University, that clarified the way forward for Lee.

 

In around 1980, Kook visited Wando and came across the works of the then unknown artist Lee Choun Hwan in his twenties, and purchased two of his works on the spot. Then he asked Lee, while watching a fishing boat making its way across the night sea, “Can you paint the sound of the boat?” The artist full of youthful spirit replied without a moment's hesitation, “I can.” It took 20 years for him to prove it through his paintings. The Sound of Nature exhibition was held in response to Kook Chaeho's question, but sadly by then he had passed away.

 

The person who had asked the question had gone, but the question remained. Actually, it was not a new question at all. Capturing the spirit in painting has been a level that many artists born in this land aspire to achieve. Xie He (謝赫, flourished in c. 525 - c. 575), a Chinese artist who had a great influence on not only Chinese but also Korean painters, proposed that the first of his “Six Principles” of good painting was, “spirit resonance, life-motion (氣韻生動).” Capturing the spirit resonance must have been a familiar quest for Lee, who began his career with traditional ink wash painting. However, now the goal had changed: The question Kook casually posed to Lee had turned a long-standing question in the art world into a specific goal for him.

 

 

 

The goal of capturing spirit resonance gave Lee Choun Hwan standing at a new beginning, a clear advantage. Although he had to leave behind the familiar materials that he had been using for decades and start anew with new materials such as acrylic paint and canvas, he possessed a goal that might take a novice artist years of wandering to obtain, which meant that he didn’t have to start from scratch. With this unwavering goal, it wouldn’t have been a difficult task to learn to use new materials and acquire appropriate techniques for this experienced artist who had devoted his whole life to painting. The reward of his effort came sooner than expected. His new paintings brought new admirers. New supporters of his work included the military and the police force, a rather unusual crowd in the art world. The Mood of Gyeryongsan (2014), the emblematic work of The Mood of the Mountain series and a large painting of two meters in width, was commissioned by the Army. Lee Choun Hwan was selected to paint the famous Gyeryongsan or Mount Gyeryong by the Army, and he climbed it several times and observed it from various viewpoints attempting to capture the spirit resonance of the place. However, despite several attempts, he still felt he had not achieved it. The Chief of Staff of the army heard of his dilemma and provided a helicopter for him to see the entire mountain from the sky. He worked furiously inside of the helicopter filled with noise and vibration, making numerous sketches, and The Mood of the Gyeryongsan could finally be completed.

 

Encapsulating the spirit of the mountain that is communicated to the artist could only be achieved with a huge number of sketches. As a part of nature, we communicate with it through the use of our sensory organs, sight, sound and smell, to instinctively grasp its characteristics. Although many aspects of nature can be identified through these first impressions, it is necessary to take a three-dimensional view of nature from different angles and at different times in order to articulate its deeper characteristics in a painting. The resulting The Mood of the Mountain contains the core element of the mountain, i.e., the spirit resonance, that has been filtered through the artist.

 

Interestingly, while continuing such a dialogue with nature and trying to capture the core elements of it, an artist's inner self gradually becomes synchronized. The inner self of an artist who paints the nature of Korea often will become resonant with it. Lee Choun Hwan realized this when he held an exhibition with foreign artists including Chinese artists. He learned that each artist's style, which initially seemed to be full of individuality, resembled the environment where each artist was born and raised. The works of Korean artists who paint the landscapes that surround them, gain the characteristic of “Koreanity” which permeates each work, naturally and unconsciously.

 

 

“Koreanity” is a characteristic that best explains Lee Choun Hwan's work, from the earlier ink wash paintings through The Mood of the Mountain series to the more recent works of The Moon Jar and the Light+Grain series. Not only Lee’s ink wash paintings using traditional method, but also the expression of the texture in The Mood of the Mountain which uses Western materials to depict the mountain of Korea, resembles the unsophisticated simplicity, that can also be found in the works of Park Su Geun (1914-1965). Lee’s later The Moon Jar series is the result of extensive research to find a subject matter that is distinctly Korean. His recent Light+Grain series, which appears completely abstract, can also be traced back to his works of the same title in the 1980s, which captures the moonlight reflected on the sea of his home island with ink and color. The Light+Grain series is the culmination of Lee’s achievements, that started with his early ink wash painting.

 

His ever-evolving paintings contain an unshakable core because Lee’s art is deeply rooted in the nature and culture of Korea where he was born and raised. In that sense, the works of Lee Choun Hwan demonstrate that embracing tradition and adapting to the trend are not necessarily at odds with each other, and can even be beneficial in enhancing both values.

 

It would be more accurate to say that The Mood of the Mountain series, the beginning of Lee’s transition from ink to acrylic paint, indicates an expansion of his works into a new area, rather than a change in direction. The Mood of the Mountain series is still a work in progress and continuously being reborn, along with The Moon Jar and the Light+Grain series. Art work that doesn’t evolve loses its vitality, and art work that does not have its own core tends to lose direction. Achieving a balance between the two is an important goal for any artists who have been painting for a long time. Lee Choun Hwan skillfully balances the two and continues to create art, and The Mood of the Mountain is testament to that.