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Minjung KIM (b.
1962)
Minjung Kim was born in Gwangju in the Republic of Korea in 1962. From the age of six, it was her family's wish that she study painting under various teachers, including the famous watercolorist Yeongyun Kang, and, between the ages of thirteen and twenty-nine, Oriental calligraphy. This latter study allowed her to understand the fundamental precepts of Asiatic speculative tradition. As Giangiorgio Pasqualotto describes in an illuminating essay, the peculiarity of Oriental writing “lies in the fact that it is able to design not just the structure of each object, but also, and above all, the action, the active power and the efficacy that the object, whether material or conceptual, contains and expounds. This capacity to make visible the activity or efficacy of an object is in perfect harmony with the way earliest Chinese culture - classical Tao – understood the universe, as it had always considered everything that is real, not as a set of objects, but as an infinite universe of processes: on the basis of this conception of the world, everything, including apparently inert objects, is invested with an active power, an energy that is not secondary to its existence" (G. Pasqualotto, La via delta scrittura, 1992).
The study of calligraphy did not just endow Minjung with this vision of the world but also taught her to communicate by means of the extremely controlled use of the brush, which "channels" the energy and directs it onto the paper. When in 1980 she enrolled in the Hong Ik University in Seoul, Minjung had already received a very thorough artistic education, which was completed through the detailed study of Oriental painting under Taejin Ha, Sunam Song and Sukhchang Hong. Once her university course had been completed in 1985, she took a Master's degree at the same university with a thesis on the four basic materials in ink painting (rice paper, brush, ink pigment and the pigment grinding stone). In 1991 she decided to move to Italy and enroll at the Brera Academy in Milan. Here she studied less the basics of European painting, which she had already tackled at university in Korea, than the analysis of the works of Western artists who, during the 20th century, studied Oriental painting. In particular, certain works by Paul Klee and Franz Kline prompted her to approach a new aesthetic direction that took her progressively away from the figurative tradition of her country of origin towards an investigation of the expressive value of marks and maculas, two stylistic elements that combine perfectly with the "process-based view of the world" and the ability to "channel the energy", both of which she learned in her study of calligraphy. This change of direction was also dictated by, her attending courses at the Brera Academy held by Maurizio Bottarelli, who focused his lectures on the perceptive quality of maculas and on experimentation in watercolor techniques. The last two years of her academic studies, and the period after attaining her diploma, were spent with Diego Esposito from whom Minjung learned the basics of avant-garde concepts and the expressive freedom that typifies the more recent artistic trends.
Her exploration of the interrelationship between Oriental and Western techniques and conceptions continues outside the Academy. In her pictorial work - which she always executes on the floor in keeping with Oriental tradition, because both literally and metaphorically the floor is the basic support for all painting - Minjung tends to use increasingly concentrated watercolors in order to express effectively the intensity the colors contain. Furthermore, in her works made during 1998 on overlaid layers of paper, she burned sections of them to generate an effect of three-dimensionality, to provide the viewer with a chronological dimension, and to indicate layers of time symbolized by the layers of paper. Minjung currently lives and works in Milan, Italy.
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