Kim Hoseok’s Ink-and-wash Portrait Paintings: How to Express Spirit through Shape?

This paper examines the artistic attitude and aesthetic consciousness of Gajeon (可田) Kim Ho-seok (金鎬䄷, b. 1957), focusing on his exploration of the theory of Korean traditional painting through his ink-and-wash portrait paintings and their modern interpretation. Kim Ho-seok has explored themes of human life, historical scenes, and consciousness of the times, employing his distinctive ink-and-wash techniques in various forms, including historical portraits, folk paintings, crowd paintings, Zen monk portraits, and line drawings.<br/> In the 1980s, influenced by the Gwangju Democratization Movement, which stood against the injustice and violence of the military regime, Kim used black ink to depict figures involved in national popular movements such as the Donghak Peasant Revolution, the anti-Japanese volunteer struggle, the April 19 Revolution, the June Uprising, the great workers' struggles, and university rallies. Through these works, he examined historical events and the lives of the people who participated in them.<br/> In the 1990s, Kim shifted his focus to satirizing the absurdity of the times and critiquing human desires, employing metaphors and humorous expressions to comment on the contradictions of human society. His ink-and-wash paintings engage with the problem of aesthetic representation, particularly how to depict Spirit through shape, grounded in the concept of ‘sa-ui’ (the expression of will/寫意), and the ‘theory of transmitting spirit through shape’ (傳神論).<br/> This paper further investigates Kim’s exploration of the act of ‘drawing Spirit’ and the ‘use of shape/form’ (以形) in his artistic practice after 2006, when the exhibition “Aiming at Civilization” was held. It argues that Kim’s paintings integrate ink, the ‘drawn part’, and the ‘non-drawn part’ (blank space) into a cohesive whole through the correspondence of realism and symbolism. Additionally, his work employs the technique of ‘barim’ (shading/渲 染) in the blank margins to express concepts such as ‘drawn without drawing’ or ‘shape without shape’.<br/> The ‘shape’ and ‘Spirit’ presented in Kim Ho-seok’s works are formative languages that correspond respectively to ‘being’ and ‘nothingness’. Through these philosophical and contemporary articulations, Kim is expanding the horizons of Korean ink-and-wash painting, offering a new synthesis of tradition and modernity.