미술과 선교 사업

미술과 선교 사업

There was a Studio Art student who took my English conversation class names Hyun-Ji. That was not her real name, but let's pretend it was...just for the sake of this entry. I can't use her real name.

Anyway, on with and straight into the story. Hyun-Ji was about twenty one when she first came to my class─an aspiring artist who was struggling with finding her voice; maybe trying too hard to seek her place in an art world which she hadn't entered yet. Add to this her youth, which brought with it the need for stable self-identity, and she was in turmoil. Her soul and mind were boiling.

In this current climate, many Koreans aren't afforded the freedom to really come to terms with their own identity until they graduate high school. The rigorous schedule and demands for high test grades diminish the personal time and life outside of school exponentially each year of high school. After completion of their university entrance exams and successfully entering a university, many young Koreans are giving the free time they didn't know they desired.

For Hyun-Ji, this opportunity to find herself was proving difficult with the onslaught of pontifications from art professors at her university and young Italian artists she met during her year abroad. It has always seemed to me that the current artists haven't really solved the problem of the abstract expressionists and still find it impossible to understand how to express the soul. The constant struggle has left us some beautiful art but no real answers have come. This is just my opinion based on some years as an aspiring artist which abruptly stopped when I discovered that I did, in fact, love Literature, despite the attempts of my high school English teacher to destroy any joy we might have felt from reading. But, I was still that young artist who copied the ideas of movements long past their prime, trying to find something new and slowly realizing that I was just a copy of a fifties era art movement.

But, enough with the rant. This is about Hyun-Ji.

Over a few classes, she would dominant the conversations I had set up so the students could practice some real world English. It wasn't that she was trying to get the best grade in her class, it was that her internal struggles were attempting to find comfort and closure through the help of those around her. And, through these talks, I learned that her identity issues were much larger than I had originally thought. She wasn't just trying to find her place in life and her voice in the art world, but it was all more holistic. Her soul was in an all out free-for-all with its own identity, and Hyun-Ji wanted to know if there was a God or not.

This is where I came in, and I am glad I was there to help─the outspoken teacher who never shied away from speaking his beliefs and sharing his Testimony was were Hyun-Ji began when she asked about the existence of God. She was very intelligent for her age and very well read into art, and so a discussion connecting art and theology was a topic she could relate to more easily.

The discussions usually continued after class and they steered toward Duchamp and Dadaism and how it was still relevant in current society because young people were struggling with understand the post-modern world their parents expected them to live a Victorian life in. 

Duchamp did the unthinkable in the 

art community and drew a mustache 

on the Mona Lisa, thereby parodying it

and, in the minds of many art critics,

destroying a well-known piece of art.

Affected by the war, Duchamp released a 

serious of personal pieces, giving tribute 

homage to those medics who saved him.

These pieces were also a way to make

sense of a war that had destroyed the current

mentality of the people and threw them into

chaos.

As a prime example of Dadaism, 

Duchamp took a toilet and signed 

someone else's name to it, thereby

making the world question what

could be considered art.

And, we discussed how Motherwell and Rothko were quality artists because they had the theories and knowledge to backup their seemingly easy and childish art to the lay viewer.

Motherwell's most famous painting.

A typical example of Rothko's work.

The directions of the topics were easily steered to the concrete answers the Book of Mormon could give despite the seemingly dense and abstract mode of believing she had a stereotype about, and how discomfort and nausea in the current society was hard to express, but there were answers, at least for those who don't deny absolutes.

There were talks of Basquiat, Pollock, and Warhol, and even Johns and Hirst. 

An example of Basquiat's work.

Johns did a series of American flags.

Pollock created a new kind of 

art, commonly referred to as

'drip painting.'

These artists produced a lot of work that may seem simplistic, but with a certain eye, the mind would open up to expose a wider view of the material universe and our understanding of it. I mean, what she needed to understand was that holy men and believers tirelessly brought forth poetry that attempted to show our place in this grand existence, and the artists, although attempting the same thing, usually did without the aid of the Spirit and were therefore lacking in a basic, yet infinite, part of what it takes to understand.

Artists made us question aesthetics, beauty, life, and our place in this world by destroying and then creating new facets by which we can place ourselves in the overall grand worldview that is so ever widening and expanding. The artists, as Hyun-Ji focused on them, could only take her so far into the depths of culture and the psyche. There was a limit understanding when the Spirit was not involved. And so she agreed to take the Bible and read it. I asked her to think more three dimensionally when it came to her place in this world and not focus on what man could give us because there were horrible limits to that kind of view. And, considering the connections she could easily make, I am sure that she will soon come to some conclusion about her self-identity and the Spirit.

I can hope, and hopefully future journal entries will show the fruit produced by the few seeds I planted where she painted.