Hyeeun KANG

<A Parade of Colorful Lines Spun with the Joys and Sorrows of Life>

The history of spinning thread and weaving fabric is long. The long history has been shaped mostly by the hands of women, probably because, by its nature, it was a comparatively easy job to do while raising a child. According to The Golden Thread (2018), written by Kassia St. Clair focusing on the history of threads, millions of women before the Industrial Revolution picked mulberry leaves, fed silkworms, spun thread by hand, and sat in front of the loom to weave the cloth to the point where even their fingernails fell out. When textile factories appeared, women worked 60 hours a week, suffering from dust and noise. The history of threads is the history of women’s life and labor. The joys and sorrows of their life are woven into the fabric that is the result of hard and tedious labor of interweaving the warp vertically hung down and the weft crossing across it. Kang Hye Eun builds up innumerable lines of color with oil paints on the canvas, just like the warp and weft cross each other to weave a fabric. As women have done in the past hundreds of years, she spins countless threads out of paints, weaving the joys and sorrows of life as a woman and artist into the canvas.

강혜은, line – piece 2301, 162×112cm, oil on panel, 2023

The first question commonly asked by those who first see her work is about materials. At first glance, it is difficult to tell whether it is thread or paint. Thin, long lines of color are stacked layer upon layer and overlap each other to fill the whole canvas. As the lines of different colors overlap and harmonize with each other to make them visually fluffy and fuzzy to the touch. Through 10 years of trial and error, she has finally completed the technique of drawing threads out of paints. As if a silkworm pulls thread to make a cocoon, she applies appropriate pressure to the tubes of paint with her grip only, to pull out thick and thin lines of color. Instead of mixing paints on the palette to make colors, she squeezes the paints by hand, stacks the lines of primary colors to harmonize the overall hue. Lines of oil paints, which look like threads, overlap each other to create layers, forming small spaces between the layers. The canvas is flat, yet the overall three-dimensional effect is due to the spaces created by the layers of colored lines of oil paints.

강혜은, line – piece 2345, 162×112cm, oil on panel, 2023

This technique was greatly influenced by the artist’s mother who was like a living witness in the history of the thread mentioned earlier. Born in 1956, Kang Hye Eun spent her childhood in Busan, and her mother ran a large dressmaker’s shop in Seomyeon of the city. Inside the shop, there was a workroom and a small factory to make clothes, and when her mother was working, she would play with threads and fabrics next to her mother. For her, thread and cloth are materials that remind her of her mother. Now, over the age of sixty, the artist says that when she touches thread and cloth, she seems to go back to her childhood and feels like she is in her mother’s bosom. After majoring in painting at Seoul Women’s University, she started her work in earnest in the 1990s. After marriage, she followed her husband, who was an environmental activist, into a mountain 500 meters above sea level to live and raise children. Just as women had lived for hundreds of years while weaving fabrics and raising children, Kang Hye Eun continued to work in the remote mountain area, keeping house and taking care of children. Until she moved her studio to Yangsan in 2014, she has lived among the mountains of dense woods for 20 years as part of nature. The ‘20 years spent in nature’ may sound like a practice of rural ideals in the Eastern tradition such as ‘物我一體’ (mul-a-il-che: unity of the ego and the outside world) and ‘安貧樂道’ (an-bin-nag-do: being content amid poverty and taking pleasure in acting in an honest way). But she says it was a continuation of a desperate and gruesome life that was difficult to endure mentally and physically, if she had not held on to the ‘string’ of art. Because she squeezes the paints, controlling the strength with the sole power of the grip, her knuckles are curved, and there is hardly any place intact including the joints and eyes. However, during the time devoted to her art, she must have put down the burden of life from her shoulders even for a moment.

강혜은, line – piece 2403, 80×80cm, oil on panel, 2024

Her early work was centered on ‘lines’ including collage, scratch, taping, and dripping using threads, cloths, and paints. At the age of 50, which is called the age when one comes to know Providence, she first attempted a technique that seemed to pull threads out of oil paints. Works at this period were the representations of nature, which she encountered every day, into figurative shapes. Their themes were derived from her life in nature where she had been living for 20 years as its part. Her unique attempt, which lasted for a few years, reached the point where she piled up paints as fine as silk threads, which is reminiscent of delicate and colorful Oriental embroidery.

Kang Hye Eun, who has been immersed in spinning paint so finely and delicately that it is difficult to distinguish whether it is thread or paint, has become accustomed to freely controlling the thickness of the color lines. And now, on the contrary, she tries the method of revealing the physical properties of oil paints. If the previous work was a detailed process of endeavor to make the finest lines possible, this new attempt shows the boldness of a method that involves throwing lumps of oil paints in the middle of stacking color lines, bursting them, and mixing up coarse and fine threads so that they intersect each other. As she descended from the mountain and moved her studio to the city area in 2014, the themes of her work, which used to be limited to the landscape of ‘nature’, also diversified. Works at this period include the landscape of the ‘city’ that reconstructed the memories of her childhood in the city where she was born and raised, Water Lilies series produced as a homage to Claude Monet after her trip to Giverny, the setting of the French master’s Water Lilies series.

강혜은, line-piece 2332, 145.5,×89.4cm, oil on panel, 2023

Given the nature of oil painting, which requires time for paints to dry, she cannot work with the canvas upright on the easel. She always lays the canvas on a flat surface, bends her waist forward to work as if scattering paints with her hands. She says that this process itself is a kind of training, but it is actually more like an act of penance. As she catches her breath and concentrates totally on her fingertips, her mind becomes calm and solemn. When she holds fast a mass of paint in her hand and spins colored lines, the happy memories of her childhood and the nostalgia for those days are condensed and accumulated on the canvas. Just as the women in the old days pulled the thread by hand and sat in front of the loom to weave the cloth, Kang Hye Eun bends over the canvas for the tiring process of continually stacking the lines to complete a work.

Recently she tries to work more freely from colors and forms, breaking down the representational shapes. If her previous work was a process of focusing on the level of completion, from now on she tries to be livelier and more energetic by focusing on the ‘act’ of working itself. That is why we can look forward to Kang Hye Eun’s next move even more.

Kim Jeongwon (Curator, Gallery MAC)

GALLERY MAC
2F, 162 Dalmaji-gil117beonna-gil, Haeundae-gu, Busan, 48115, South Korea
+82-51-722-2201

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