Korean Contemporaneity: Tower of the Mind, Bookshelf of Knowledge

LeVide 르비드

May 22, 20261m ago

The image of the mind coming back to life after the collapse

Kim Dong-hee's *Yeomwon* is not a work depicting a stone tower.

It is a work that embodies the human spirit of rebuilding even after collapse and striving to live again even in moments that appear dead.

The stones in the artwork rest precariously on a black void. At times, a single very small stone appears to support a much larger one, while at other times, they form an unstable structure that seems physically impossible to exist. This stone tower is not a stable structure with precise balance found in reality. Rather, it is a form that appears fragile, as if it could collapse at any moment, yet strangely manages to hold its ground.

This sense of precariousness is an important sentiment in Kim Dong-hee's work.

The artist's stone tower is not a completed monument, but rather closer to a state of mind that has not yet given up even after passing through collapse.

The author speaks of "building and building again, even after crumbling," using a phrase that permeates her life. Everyone lives building a tower within their hearts, where effort, goals, relationships, responsibilities, and the totality of life experiences form a single tower of the mind. However, the moment that tower collapses, humans face a harsh reality. Kim Dong-hee likens the act of setting a new direction and moving forward, rather than giving up in the face of that collapse, to the act of building a stone tower.

However, if you look closely at Kim Dong-hee's stone towers, the surface of the stones does not appear to be merely stone. Rather, a texture resembling wood grain remains on the canvas. This point is deeply connected to the artist's experience. One day, the artist saw a tree in the mountains that had been felled and lay there as if dead. That sight resembled his own state at the time. In the tree, which seemed to have been cut down and stopped growing, and in its form that appeared unable to grow any further, the artist saw his own broken heart.

However, when passing by that spot again later, new sprouts were blooming from the dead tree. Although it appeared to be over on the surface, the movement of life striving to revive was continuing within the tree. The author gains a significant realization from that scene: the fact that even within an existence that appears dead, energy and a struggle to come back to life remain. This sense of life subsequently enters the stone tower of *Yeomwon*.

Therefore, Kim Dong-hee's stone tower is stone and at the same time wood.

It stands heavy and solid like stone, yet a grain of life flows across its surface, striving to revive like wood. This is a highly significant sculptural choice. The stone tower symbolizes aspiration, while the texture of the wood suggests the vitality of recovery. By layering the two, the artist creates not merely a form of making a wish, but a form of a heart striving to live again.

The black void in the work is not merely a background. It is the silence following collapse, and a time when nothing appears to move. The white stones placed upon it appear like traces of aspirations barely remaining in that silence. The deep, black surface created by ink, lacquer, and charcoal powder resembles darkness, while the grains of stone and wood revealed upon it emerge like traces of life.

In this exhibition, *Korean Contemporaneity: Tower of the Mind, Bookshelf of Knowledge*, Kim Dong-hee's work forms an axis called the 'Tower of the Mind.' Here, being Korean does not simply refer to traditional patterns or decorative images. Kim Dong-hee's Koreanness is revealed within the structure of aspirations, as well as the materiality of ink, Jangji, and charcoal, and the ancient, everyday, and folk symbol of the stone tower.

The stone towers found on Korean mountain paths, at temple entrances, and at the edge of villages are not grand institutions or official monuments. They are places where nameless individuals have placed their hearts. Built as one person places a stone, and another places one upon another, these stone towers represent a way in which individual wishes remain as a collective landscape. Kim Dong-hee borrows the form of these stone towers but does not depict them as a representation of reality. The artist's stone towers are so precarious that they seem difficult to actually exist. For this very reason, they resemble our lives even more.

Today's life does not rest stably on a solid order. Individuals are constantly shaken amidst failure, loss, rifts in relationships, and the pressures of reality. Sometimes, a single, tiny reason supports an entire life, while conversely, a single small crack can bring everything down. Kim Dong-hee's stone towers illustrate precisely this unstable structure of life. They are not monuments to success, but rather images of the mind seeking balance at every moment to avoid collapse.

The author views the act of building a stone tower as a "miniature version of life." They state that the strength to achieve things on one's own is cultivated within the time spent selecting suitable stones, concentrating, enduring, and balancing. This process is akin to meditation, and the accumulation of moments of building the tower of the mind shapes who one is today.

This statement serves as an important key to understanding Kim Dong-hee's work. *Yeomwon* is a work that is closer to the process of rebuilding a tower than to the tower as a result. This is also the reason why the stone tower in the work is not perfectly stable. This tower is not finished; it continues to endure and continues to come back to life. It resembles a new tree sprout that pushes up life again even after collapsing.

If Lim Su-sik’s *Chaekgado* depicts a "bookshelf of knowledge" where a person’s knowledge and memories are accumulated, Kim Dong-hee’s *Yeomwon* shows a "tower of the mind" that rebuilds a broken heart. One is a way of recording the present, and the other is a way of enduring it. When these two artists are placed together, Korean contemporaneity is revealed not as an image of past tradition, but as a sensibility that still operates within today’s life.

What do we rebuild even after it has collapsed?

What grows again even in time that has stopped as if dead?

And does the tower of the mind only become ourselves after it has collapsed several times?

His stone tower is quiet but not weak.

It is a small will left upon the black silence,

Like a new sprout pushing up again from within a dead tree,

It is the image of the mind trying to live again even after collapse.

By Lim Su-sik_Chaekgado 460_Bookshelf at the Goethe House in Frankfurt, Germany_Hand stitching on printed Hanji_80x60cm_2023

Portrait of a Bookshelf, Today's Bookcase

Lim Soo-sik’s *Chaekgado* is not a work that merely transplants traditional forms into the present. While his work borrows the familiar painting style of *Chaekgado* from the late Joseon Dynasty, what it captures is not the stationery of the past or an idealized world of knowledge, but the inner self of an individual living today. To the artist, a bookshelf is not merely furniture on which books are placed, but a place where a person’s accumulated time, tastes, thoughts, and memories are condensed.

Traditional Chaekgado was a style of painting that visualized the desire for knowledge and the ideal of scholarship through books, the Four Treasures of the Study, objects, and decorative items. However, Lim Soo-sik transforms this format into the actual bookshelves of modern people. He photographs a study, prints the images onto Hanji (Korean traditional paper), and then composes the screen using hand stitching, much like joining pieces of patchwork. Since 2005, the artist has been reinterpreting the Chaekgado of the late Joseon Dynasty (18th and 19th centuries) in a modern way, completing a single Chaekgado by printing photographs of studies onto Hanji and stitching them together by hand.

What is important here is that Lim Soo-sik's work is a photograph, yet it does not remain merely a photograph. His *chaekgado* (paintings of bookshelves) are complex images that combine photography as a record, the composition of traditional painting, the materiality of Hanji, and the temporality of hand sewing within a single frame. The photograph captures the reality of the bookshelf, Hanji imbues that reality with the texture of traditional sensibility, and the sewing leaves the time of the hand upon the image. The resulting image appears not as the smooth surface of a digital photograph, but as a single fabric stitched with time and memory.

Im Soo-sik's bookshelf is neither a still life nor interior decoration. It is a portrait. While a typical portrait reveals a person through their face, Im Soo-sik's *Chaekgado* (Bookcase Painting) reveals a person's inner self through the indirect device of the bookshelf. What books have been read, which books are kept close by, what remains and what is emptied, and what objects are placed among the books speak of that person's world. The bookshelf is an intellectual map of how an individual has constructed themselves, and at the same time, a trace of the time they have passed.

At this point, Lim Su-sik's *Chaekgado* differs decisively from traditional *Chaekgado*. While traditional *Chaekgado* embodied the ideal of a life close to books, an encouragement to learning, and the symbolism of knowledge, Lim Su-sik's *Chaekgado* reveals the actual life of a specific individual. It is not a bookshelf as a universal ideal, but a bookshelf as a record of an individual life. Therefore, in his work, books are not merely symbols of knowledge, but become traces permeated into a person's life.

In this exhibition, *Korean Contemporaneity: Tower of the Mind, Bookshelf of Knowledge*, Lim Soo-sik's work serves as the axis of the "bookshelf of knowledge." When discussing Korean contemporaneity, we often first think of traditional colors, patterns, materials, and symbols. However, the Korean identity demonstrated by Lim Soo-sik's work does not lie in superficial ornamentation. It lies in the way the traditional visual structure of *chaekgado* (paintings of books and stationery) is connected to life today. He transplants the *chaekgado* of the Joseon Dynasty into the modern person's study and transforms the ideal of knowledge embodied by the past stationery culture into today's personal tastes and records of the inner self.

Furthermore, his work quietly yet clearly reveals Korean materiality. Photographs printed on Hanji, hand stitching reminiscent of patchwork, and compositions created by joining multiple screen fragments demonstrate that traditional sensibilities and modern media can coexist without conflict. In particular, the hand stitching leaves a trace of physical time on the surface of the image. This connects to the time it takes for books to stack, the time it takes for a person to read and contemplate, and the time it takes for a person's world to be formed.

Im Soo-sik's bookshelf is quiet yet dense. The books themselves are silent, but their arrangement implies many things. The color and thickness of the spines, the old and the new, the rhythm of vertical and horizontal lines, the empty spaces, and the overlapping objects all become a single visual sentence. As the viewer gazes at the bookshelf, they are led to imagine its owner. And at some point, the gaze, which initially thought it was looking at someone else's bookshelf, shifts toward reflecting on one's own bookshelf, one's own tastes, and one's own life.

This is the contemporaneity inherent in Lim Soo-sik's *Chaekgado*. He does not stop at merely preserving or restoring tradition. Through traditional forms, he reads the individual of today, records today's lives, and visualizes the inner world of modern people. In his work, *Chaekgado* is reborn not as a painting style of the past, but as a portrait of the present era.

What makes up a person?

What do we read, what do we leave behind, and through what do we constitute ourselves?

And what face of our soul is today's bookshelf reflecting?

In this exhibition, Lim Soo-sik’s *Chaekgado* (paintings of books and stationery) confronts Kim Dong-hee’s *Tower of the Mind*, creating another layer of Korean contemporaneity. While Kim Dong-hee depicts the structure of the mind rebuilding a collapsed life through stone towers, Lim Soo-sik shows how a person’s knowledge and memories accumulate through bookshelves. One is the act of building the mind, while the other is the act of recording life. The works of the two artists demonstrate, in different forms, that today’s Korean sensibility is still being built, connected, and recorded.

Therefore, Lim Su-sik's *Chaekgado* is not a simple image of a bookshelf.

It is another portrait reflecting a person's soul, and

It is a quiet way for tradition to breathe again within today's life.

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