A Room of Quiet
“There is an ancient saying that the sense of a vessel is not in its shell but in the void. So it is with this room. It is for those who come here to fill the void with what they find in their center of stillness.”
– Dag Hammarskjöld’s instructions for the United Nation’s “Room of Quiet,” 1957
Spectral figures flicker in and out of the lush, otherworldly topography of Koo Kyung Sook’s recent body of work. At times disintegrating into delicate webbed surfaces, and at other moments emanating forth like oil on water, Koo’s figures dwell on the borders of our perception. In 2004, Koo turned away from the sculptural practice that had occupied her earlier career to begin exploring the human body in two-dimensional form. In contrast to the autobiographical sculptures that she had cast from her own body, her recent compositions appear to approach pure abstraction. A close examination of Koo’s new works, however, reveals the enduring primacy of the artist’s body in both her source material and in the intense physicality of her artistic approach. As Koo continues to abstract her own body, she has opened up space for viewers to enter and animate her compositions.
The earliest work in Koo’s exhibition at the University Library Gallery, California State University, Sacramento, Invisible Torso 3 – red (2005), provides a constant touchpoint for the artist’s more recent explorations. Belying the artwork’s title, the body is far from invisible in this work. Red splatters drip down the paper surface and bleed into the pulsating particles that form the truncated figure at the center. Koo created the work by pressing her body against a sheet of bubble wrap that she had soaked in developer and laid over a grid of photographic paper. She returned to the prepared surface time-and-again, creating dozens of body prints. Once satisfied with her source material, Koo developed and scanned the photographs. On the computer, she digitally rearranged the individual panels. Koo then printed the final composition onto 16 sheets of mulberry paper and mounted them as a grid that together comprises the looming figure.
Koo began working with the grid-format after undergoing medical treatment just one year before completing Invisible Torso 3 – red (2005). She explained, “All the body scans I had during the treatment helped me to understand how the body is a complex biological collaboration going on visibly (figuration) and invisibly (abstraction) to maintain the life of the body.”[1] By digitally manipulating and reconfiguring the impressions left by her body, Koo brings awareness to the internal and external forces that shape how one moves through life. Bisected by the grid, the truncated body draws one’s eyes up toward the void where the figure’s head would be. Absent of identifying features such as a face or hands, the body is no longer Koo’s own but belongs to a universal subject.
Slippages between representation and abstraction, the whole and the part, recur throughout Koo’s recent work. Always open to experimenting with new sources of inspiration, Koo has frequently collaborated with her husband, the painter Ian Harvey, over the years. In Figure 5 (2009), the two artists covered thousands of business-card sized pieces of paper in a medley of materials: enamel, polyurethane, shellac, graphite, synthetic gold and silver. The push and pull of the pigments as they collided, separated, and eventually settled on the paper serves as an apt metaphor for the negotiations required between the two artists who have widely different approaches. Once their improvisatory sessions were complete, they assembled a composite image that combined the materials from Harvey’s paintings and a silhouette made from Koo’s body print, Markings 7-3 (2007).
Koo developed her Markings series during a moment in which she was deeply immersed in the writings of Swedish politician Dag Hammarskjöld, and she named it after his memoir that was posthumously discovered and published in 1963. In Markings, Hammarskjöld narrated his ongoing struggle to reconcile his inner spiritual world with his physical world of deeds and actions. This duality between the internal and external has become a signature quality of Koo’s Markings series—a title that she continues to use today.
In Markings 11-6 and 11-7 (2011), Koo turned her attention to the head, which was absent from many of her earlier works. Adopting a technique similar to Invisible Torso 3 – red (2005), Koo covered her head with a loose plastic bag soaked in developer and pressed it on to photographic paper. Koo used this method to make hundreds of abstract photographic drawings and then scanned and digitally assembled an entirely new head—the impressions did not necessarily correspond with their placement in the final layout—from the individual panels. She printed the composition onto forty sheets of paper, which she then mounted onto aluminum panels. As in Invisible Torso 3 – red and Figure 5, Koo committed to using whatever tools necessary, whether they be of the imagination or of digital technologies, to encapsulate her experience of the body.
After making digital prints for several years, Koo began searching for a new process that would better embody her sculptural background and material approach to developing a composition. In 2013, a master printer and friend from South Korea, Yun Yeo Guel, introduced Koo to the woodblock printing technique. With woodblock printing, Koo was able to again explore three-dimensionality within the vertical surface of her compositions. Woodblock printing has an extensive history in Korean culture, dating back to the 8th century CE, and mulberry paper—Koo’s preferred substrate—has long been championed by Korean woodblock printers for its durability. Though well versed in the tradition of woodblock printing, Koo is also familiar with the range of influences that have informed contemporary South Korean printmakers (she explored this subject in the exhibition, The Land and the People, which she co-curated in the University Library Gallery in 2014). As artist and journalist Mikko Lautamo explained in a review of the 2014 exhibition, former South Korean dictator Chun Doo-hwan (1979 to 1988) denounced printmaking under his government, feeling threatened by the political ideologies spread by the medium. Artists interested in woodblock printing needed to travel to Germany to study the technique.[2] As a result, contemporary South Korean printmakers opened up their work to a range of cultural approaches. Though Koo has only recently embraced woodblock printing, her pragmatic approach to utilizing technologies best suited to achieve her desired effect resonates with the work of her contemporaries.
Koo again used the body printing process that she refined in Invisible Torso 3 – red to develop many of her woodblock prints in the California State University, Sacramento exhibition. After digitally assembling a composite body print, Koo traced the figure onto MDF and used a power rotary tool to carve the image into the wooden board. When she needed deeper recesses within the block, Koo additionally used a router or a Computer Numerical Control (CNC) machine that cut it according to her computer-generated design. Once Koo prepared the block, she then built up the paper relief. Exceedingly demanding in their physical production, Koo’s woodcut prints comprise many layers of mulberry paper that the artist individually laminated with rice glue and pounded together with a hard brush. Her entire body was thus integrated into the concept and production of her woodcuts.
Though Koo continued to focus on the head in many of her early woodcuts, such as Markings 14-4 and 14-5 (2014), details of the woodcuts take on new evocative forms: the drips of photographic developer that suggested blood in Invisible Torso 3 – red (2005) here read as spindly growths on a rugged mountainous landscape. Koo’s representations of the head are most legible in Markings 14-1, 14-2, and 14-3 (2014), which sheset against a neutral backdrop. In each composition, however, the face is enshrouded by interlacing black tendrils, again hiding its identity. The topographical qualities of Koo’s heads provide a glimpse into the artist’s imagination. Koo’s use of her own body, and particularly the head, to index her inner and outer worlds brings to mind the work of William Kentridge. Kentridge adopts a multidisciplinary approach in his artistic practice—making drawings, prints, sculptures, and stop-motion films—to ruminate upon the place of the individual in the ever-evolving landscape of his home country of South Africa. Like Kentridge, Koo’s woodblock printing teacher, Yoon Yeo Geul, also works in animation, resulting in prints that appear to jump off the page. While Koo has not digitally animated her prints, her recent works possess an internal movement made possible by her technological mediations.
In Markings 17-1, 17-2, and 17-4 (2017) Koo produced the relief printing plates using a CNC. Though the minute details of her hand carvings are lost, the flat expanses rendered by the machine provided space for Koo to experiment with the misalignment between the figure and ground. By misregistering the ink and the relief surface, Koo created a vibrating effect within the composition. As one’s eyes move back and forth between the two-dimensional ink and the three-dimensional space of the woodcut, the viewer’s own movements join the rising and falling crescendo of the figures that writhe within the sculpted picture plane.
Two of Koo’s most recent works, Markings 18-1 and 18-4 (2018), bring the exhibition into the current moment. Each spanning approximately 230 inches horizontally, Markings 18-1 and 18-4 signal a new scale and direction for the artist. Koo produced these worksfrom right to left, in the manner of a traditional Korean text or landscape painting. Just as Invisible Torso 3 – red is stitched together with photographic impressions of the body captured at different moments in time, the scale of Markings 18-1 and 18-4 asks the viewer to experience them durationally. These prints cannot be consumed from a single vantage point, but require viewers to walk from one end to the other, backward and forward in order to fully take in the work. At different intervals within Koo’s latest artworks, collaged components grab the eye, beckoning for a closer look. The artist’s body has all but been removed, yet her physical presence remains ineffable. Like the figures that have flickered in and out of Koo’s compositions since 2005, her recent works heighten our awareness of our own precarious existence, which is bound by the forces of time.
Individually, Koo’s prints reverberate with motion, yet together they create a space of quiet. Koo has “filled the void” with that which lies at her “center of stillness,” and she now invites us to do the same.
Francesca Wilmott
Francesca Wilmott is pursuing her Ph.D. in the History of Art at The Courtauld Institute of Art in London. She formerly served as Associate Curator at the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at the University of California, Davis; Curatorial Assistant at The Museum of Modern Art in New York; and Research Assistant at the Saint Louis Art Museum. Francesca’s writing has been published in Irving Marcus: Romance & Disaster (Davis: Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, 2018); Wayne Thiebaud: 1958–1968 (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018); Marcel Broodthaers: A Retrospective (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2016); and Yoko Ono: One Woman Show, 1960–1971 (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2015).
(From Koo Kyung Sook: Markings, University Library Gallery, California State University, Sacramento, California, exhibition catalog, 2019)