Inside the Windshield He Hid a Story of His Own — The Year He Came Out of a Long Tunnel · Reading MINSEOK No.13

In 2011 he put his name on the line twice.

In February his first solo exhibition opened at Gallery MAC in Busan. It was called ⟨Competition⟩. Later that year he opened a second one at Seoul Auction Busan, and that one was called ⟨It’s time to begin.⟩

The two shows are two different stories. ⟨Competition⟩ is the story of heading into the tunnel, and of being inside it. ⟨Begin⟩ is the story of coming out of that long dark tunnel and starting again.

This essay is the second story. The one inside the tunnel comes next time.

⟨Begin NO.12⟩ is 165 by 96.9 centimetres, the largest in the series. The first thing you see is the sky. It is bright. There is not one dark place in it.

That is the brightness a person sees just after leaving a tunnel.

Inside the windshield he hid a story of his own.

In ⟨Begin NO.9⟩ the orange car comes at you head-on. Look into its windshield and there is no one in the driver’s seat. There is another car in there instead, seen from behind, moving away.

It is very small. It sits in the middle of the glass, no bigger than a fingernail, with blue brushwork laid over and around it, so at first it reads as a reflection of light. There are four cars on the canvas. Only the one in the middle has this inside it.

Minseok Kang says that car is a road someone is already travelling. A direction. And he says it may well be himself.

Which makes this not the kind of competition we usually picture. There is no one to resent. What is ahead is someone who went first, and someone who went first also opened the road. It is only that the one following is young, and full of the wish to get in front.

And he hid it. He painted it small, put it in one car only, and covered it with blue. There is a story of his own in there, he says, and he did not want it shown.

In the year of his first solo exhibition, he put something he would not show into the middle of a painting made to be shown.

We look ahead the way we look into a mirror. What is there is the time still to come. The windshield holds what is ahead, and what is ahead is the future. Into that place he painted the back of someone who had already gone by.

Someone about to start does not look at the competition.

The first thing you see in this series is the car. But cover the car for a moment and things remain. Wind turbines, dish antennas, utility poles, a tunnel.

Minseok Kang says each of these carries a meaning. The wind turbine is the direction the wind is blowing. The dish antenna is news arriving from outside. The utility pole is the city. There is one more, the Ferris wheel, and that one comes later.

So this is not scenery. These are the instructions for reading the painting.

Which way is the wind. What news is coming in from outside. Where is the city. They are the things a person checks first before setting off, and you need them to read where the car in the middle is heading. The artist laid them out in advance.

The road surface running along the bottom of the canvas belongs in the same list. It is not a trace of where the car has been. It is a plane laid down in advance to show which way to go. The sense of something passing quickly, of something in motion, comes from there.

And here is the odd part. This is a painting about competition, yet half the canvas is taken up by things that have nothing to do with competing. Wind, news, city, road.

Which means it is not a painting about how to win. He painted where he was standing first.

He started from photographs he took himself.

The surfaces from this period were not painted first. They were gathered first.

There are photographs he took himself, on Jeju Island, in England, in various places. He collects fragments of those photographs and composites them into a single image. He prints that image with a laser printer, lays the paper face down on the canvas and applies heat. When the toner has transferred, he tears the paper away.

Not all of it comes across. Some areas take, some do not, and gaps are left in between. He puts acrylic into those gaps. Sometimes he builds a form; sometimes he thins the paint, lets it run where it wants, and dries it slowly.

What matters here is not the material but the order. He decided what he wanted to say first, then went out and photographed the scenes that story needed.

The work of this period is story-driven — he says so himself. The surface is not a container for a story. It is a story that has been assembled.

In London the direction of his looking changed.

London was one of the places he went to photograph. It was a trip, and he says that another direction of looking began there.

A Ferris wheel stands on the right side of ⟨Begin NO.11⟩. It is the London Eye. The whole wheel is out in the open between the pink clouds, with the capsules set one by one around the rim.

For Minseok Kang the Ferris wheel is a dream. Going up to a high, high place, and seeing far from there. An ideal, he calls it.

So it is not a souvenir of a trip. It returns again and again through the series. It is in the sky of ⟨Begin NO.12⟩ too, where it is drawn as a single thin line behind the cherry branches — you pass it by unless you go looking.

Set it beside what is in the windshield and there are two directions. The dream hangs high and far away, large in the sky. His own story is hidden small in the glass right in front of him. What he looks up at, he shows. What he faces head-on, he covered.

In ⟨The Art of Travel⟩ Alain de Botton writes that what a journey changes is not the place but the eye you come home with. What we actually get at a destination is usually not what we expected, and the real return arrives later, when we look again at somewhere familiar.

It is close. Except that de Botton’s traveller learns from the gap between expectation and reality. Minseok Kang came home with something to paint instead of a gap. For him London was not a place of disappointment but a place where one more direction appeared.

There are few icons, and that is why the story is free.

The cherry blossom and the dish antenna and the utility pole and the tunnel and the Ferris wheel are not where they are by accident. Minseok Kang says he planned the composition and placement so that the painting could be read.

But joining them into a story is left to the viewer. That is because there are not many icons. With four or five, you cannot herd anyone in one direction.

Film has something called the Kuleshov effect. About a hundred years ago the Russian director Lev Kuleshov ran an experiment. He filmed an actor’s blank face, and when he put a bowl of soup after it, audiences read hunger. A coffin, and they read grief. A child, and they read affection. The face never changed once. Only what sat beside it did.

Meaning is made on the side that joins things together.

There is a difference, though. Kuleshov fixed the order so the audience would read one thing. Minseok Kang fixed the placement but cut the number down. You can read it, but not into a single answer. He made it readable and left no correct reading.

At the time he was full of drive.

It is easy to get this wrong. Say competition and you think of anxiety; say a rival without a face and you think of fear. I almost read it that way myself.

But Minseok Kang says plainly that 2011 was not that kind of year. It was a year of overflowing drive, he says, a year when he had a goal set on a dream.

It was the year of his first solo show. The year he first put himself at the centre of the painting. The series is called ⟨Begin⟩ and his second exhibition that year was called ⟨It’s time to begin.⟩ — that is not modesty. It is a declaration.

It also explains why the sky in ⟨Begin NO.12⟩ is so bright. He had come out of the tunnel.

What came next is a completely different story.

Put his work of today beside this painting and it is hard to believe the same person made both. The forms come loose, colour and line pour forward, and often the car is hard to make out at all.

The only thing that is the same is that a car is the subject. The story being told is completely different — he says so himself. His thinking changed, grew, turned into something else.

So reading this 2011 painting only as a seed of today’s paintings is reading it wrong. It is a finished story on its own terms. A person who has just come out of a long tunnel, taking one look around at the wind and the news and the city, and setting off with the back of another car held in the glass in front of him.

Next time we go into that tunnel. That is ⟨Competition⟩.

When you began something for the first time, what was held in your windshield?

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