Myung-Ok HAN
or the objectification of a poetics
I knew almost nothing About Myung-Ok Han untel a feu years agro when i calme arrosé several of her pièces. Thèse works tant attracted, magnétisme and facinated, encouragent us to take a long look at them. The emphasis on the material, whether luminous or dark, powerful or bare, indicated an abvious personal implication in the work. These emotional and very epidermic installation clearly arose from deep thought. One contemplated the rolled-up cotton and followed the biro lines and one could see that they were projections of the mind as the author transcribed her perception of the world, letting us see her emotions and her own personal, highly meditative dynamic, while a subtle music could be heard, infused, it seemed, with a nostalgia inseparable from the heaviness of being.
Now the opportunity to meet has brought me the gentleness of a face, the strange power of a gaze, the emotion of confidences, and this in the artist's own studio, a modest but oh so mythical alveolus in the Ruche(beehive) which has afforded refuge to so many painters and sculptors, a place where people are still living and dreaming, working and creating, as they have for a century. It corresponds perfectly to both the secret path and the image of what has shapped the life of Myung-ok Han, who has seemed to withdraw from the world in order to let herself be swept along by the elaboration of her work, protected by imposing silhouettes from art history, supported by the beneficent waves that impregnate the space. My Parisian visit shed much light on this art that is both spontaneous and permanently controlled, with its calm, mastered respiration, underpinned by a total engagement of body and spirit, refusing haste or consumption, but seeming to convey inner upheavals, uncertainty as well as enthusiasm and rapture.
There are so many paradoxes in the life of Myung-ok Han, this proud young girl who left her native Korea for France to seek freedom and solitude. Proud of her knowledge and her practice of oil painting, proud to think of herself as an artist. Curiously, her uprooting to the West , which could so easily have brought chaos and darkness with the change of language and culture, has led her to self-discovery, and to a modest acceptance of everyday banality, and even poverty, but also to serenity and an inner peace achieved after much questioning : what to do? How? Why? It is by going back to her ancestral roots, in getting to grips with often the simplest forms of matter, that she found her way. A return to childhood, to a tender image also infused with anxiety, going back to spring when she was five years old, a spring rich in blue skies, with an idyllic garden, flowers and light, where there was already a sense of the finitude of things.
Myung-Ok HAN soon abandoned her practice of oil painting when she came to France. She tried a whole constellation of experiences based on a contsant relation between her everyday life and her personality, going from her birth to her life in the West, drawing on reality more than on history, apparently indifferent to fashion, seeking to find her own path so as to be fully herself, with determination and without ostentation, with the humility of a farmer ploughing his field. Indeed, for many years now she has neither defended nor attacked traditional hierarchies in her practice of different disciplines or choice of materials. There are no such things as choice materials and base materials. String is equal to marble, the ballpoint on a par with oil paint. However, Myung-Ok HAN does always have an intimate relation with her medium, whether it is ink, cotton, a shell or even the grain of the paper. In the simplicity of her options she has maintained her fidelity to her origines and her culture, and a reserve in expressing them that borders on shyness.
This was the origin of the installtions made with rice paper, pebbles, bones, pins, oyster and mussel shells and the assemblages of matchboxes, the rolls or balls of newspaper. There is in this work no intention to provoke, simply an assured sense of creative freedom and a rigour that pulls together the thousand moments of fugacity, a true ascesis and illustration of a double approach that is both diurnal and nocturnal, obvious and luminous but also secret. In these fundamental works that reveal fractions of our universe, time and space meld together and are enriched by symbols anchored to the rock-like solidity of origins, of knowledge of the beyond, and to the fragile paper bearing writings and images, all with the purity of an offering . It is impossible not mention the feeling of dizziness and silent enchantment at the constructions in carefully rolled cotton. Blocks, bowls, metal boards, plates, spoons and stretchers take on an energy of which the artist is the invisible choreographer in a space that is transparent, unreal and dreamlike. She is the attentive Penelope of work that must always be started anew. A Fate who pays out the thread of our destiny, that fragile thread, barely the breath to join the body and its priciple. Indeed, is not thread, because it can be burnt, as it was at a recent exhibition in Korea, an image of our life, whose supreme importance is due, precisely, to our inevitable death?
One could also dwell on a recent realisation by this artist which seems to introduce new notions of order and longevity. And yet the approachㅡ sticking thousand of grains of rice in rowsㅡremains the same. The result here is a surface full of emotion and of a kind of tenderness, an experience that manifestly goes beyond the notions of play or prettiness, humour or harmony, and takes part in the life of forms and of the world. Beyond the surprise or delight, and the way it tempts us to touch and caress, this piece also makes us think. A hasty glance would take this as a piece of corduroy. A more thoughtful approach discovers the nature of the material. And then more time still is needed for the message that emanates from this work to enter one's consciousness. A staple food of divine origin, rice is to the Far East as wheat to Europe, a richly symbolic food of life and immortality, of happiness and fecundity. It is also light and original purity. Here it offers us a resplendent image of balance, surprising us with its composition. In fact, it would not be surprising to see a parallel between this new work and the recent birth of child. Rhythm here is conceived as a profound, deep respiration. The whole world is rhythm, said Ubac. Nature is rhythm, life is rhythm.
In the past, the drawings that Myung-Ok Han traced with a ballpoint did not figure a landscape, or the sky or the earth, but the close links between sky and earth. They rendered the illusion of space and of an unlimited duration fro m the time of origins, like the very essence of life in the tree circulation of air, the convergence of multiple flows and the intense complexity of the universe. The interlacing of these quivering lines could be read as a kind of personal calligraphy, quite unrelated to the calligraphy of the Far East, an ascetic practice wrested from the depths of secret territories and an instinctive quest for a form of transcendence. For these wide-eyed wanderings that appear wholly the result of the hand's own fantasies are in fact the fruit of an inner necessity, a thirst for the absolute in the daring freedom of an itinerary that united being and thought, and the artist with the settings of life.
Today, her drawings have left the tellurian or volcanic regions that were brought into being by the continuous line of the ballpoint. However, the ultramarine punctuations on the large sheets describe the same rolls, the same spirals with their force lines and clustering particles. They evoke the palpitation of nature, the quivering of life, perhaps memories of Mediterranean holydays, with sea and sky as one, while at the same time working on light, a very particular, tender and tamed light. Perhaps this is a reflection or embodiment of applied linguistics, since the artist's give name, Myung-ok, signifies a subtly subdued and softened kind of light.
As for the blue, is it not already light in itself, when matter is energy and its eddying fluids are one with the flux of the world and lead to an art of the arabesque?
Whatever the techniques employed here, whatever the material taken from nature, be it cotton thread or grains of rice, the will behind Myung-Ok Han's pieces is always the same. Each of her sculpturesㅡand the term is not inappropriate here, given their combination of technical, iconographic and spatial elementsㅡcan be seen as independent of the place in which it is presented but appears to find its harmony, or even its own existence and truth, to the extent that it is in harmony with the universe. The reality of this art as much in its hidden, internal properties as it does in its appearance. The false impassivity of these works is by no means indifferent to the incessant quivering that runs through them, to the refined pulsation of a tireless quest for a motif that seemed lost but that re-emerges throught the workings of time and distance. There is certainly excess in this discernible wisdom, and mystery in the gap between what is shown and what is imagined, but how much happiness there is too in this restrained, channelled and disciplined energy! The elegant and reassuring materiality of the support is combined with a metaphysical burden that prompts questioning and reflection. All idea of mechanisation or industrialisation vanishes. Might not this be one of the magical definitions of art?
Paris, December 2002
André Depraz