REALTIART

For our final artist, I’d like to introduce Shin Kang-ho for ‘Beauty Will Save the World’, who works on the theme of ‘Link’ in sculpture and installation.  The definition of a link in a dictionary is ‘to make a connection or a relationship between two or more people’ and so on. He uses wood to work on his art these days but he used to use other materials like PVC, cogwheels, threads, etc. to talk about ‘Link’. I wonder what kind of links he really wanted to talk about. I wonder about the link, relationship or connection that he wanted to show us by changing materials. 

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 I had an interview with him two years ago and asked him why he chose wood as his material. His answer was that he found himself in a tree and I couldn’t understand that. The reason was because I had never thought of nature as something very special. I don’t remember if it was either after I met so many artists like Kang-ho who love nature or  after I got shocked by the fact that the normal can no longer be normal after the Coronavirus, but I finally realized nature is breathing. Of course, nature has life but I was over 40 years old when I finally realized it. Nature to me was something that popped up out of the blue, something so strange that made me think if it’s me or the nature that is fake. 

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However, for artist Kang-ho, nature must not have been as discomforting as it was for me. He grew up surrounded by forests and so wood was everywhere.  Wood even became his toys as he explored the woods with a sickle to find new play things. You could even say wood was there for him in his harder times.  Wood has always been a part of him.

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The spirits of the trees are playing. They are dancing. They are sleeping and thinking. The spirits of the trees that look like humans with winding lines cause me to think that they might move around while we are sleeping. Then, the human-looking sculptures encourage me to look at lots of those trees at the entrance of town, at rivers, in the middle of mountains. How could I not see that all those trees really have human shapes? His artwork had me truly understand the quote, ‘Nature is a breath of fresh air’. which sounded superficial to me before. Now, I understand what Michelangelo meant when he said he had already seen a sculpture on a stone. Each one of those spirits of the trees - the one blowing the trumpet with arms stretched, the one curled up in distress - did have the form of the embracing Mother Nature that gives a shade on a really hot summer day, tells us Fall is here by changing the colors. The link that artist Kang-ho was telling us is probably ourselves found in a feast of the winding lines of the trees, the relationship among us that are part of nature like them.

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Shinhae Kim