작업 소개

코로나19의 상황 속에서 휴관 중 막을 내린 <일어나 올라가 임동식>의 전시 기록 및 큐레이터 인터뷰 영상이다. 왠지 쓸쓸해 보이는 서울시립미술관 속 작품들을 영상으로 만나볼 수 있으며, 작품의 이야기를 들려주는 임동식 작가의 영상까지 온라인에서나마 전시의 아쉬움을 달래보고자 한다. 

“그러나 이 작업에는 특별한 논리적인 해설은 없습니다.
그냥 젖어오는 그런 감흥이었고요.
글을 통해서 사변, 탐닉, 감각
온갖 어떤 구조적인 생각 그런 것에서부터 저는 벗어날 수가 있었습니다.”

– 임동식

서울시립미술관은 2020년 8월 19일부터 《일어나 올라가 임동식》 展을 서소문 본관 1층 전시실에서 개최한다. 《일어나 올라가 임동식》 展은 순수 자연에 대한 강렬한 사랑을 바탕으로 예술 세계를 펼쳐온 한국 자연 미술가 임동식(1945~)의 개인전이다. 2018년부터 임동식은 4차에 걸쳐 서울시립 미술 아카이브(2021년 12월 개관 예정)를 위해 서울시 문화본부에 본인의 예술기록 자원을 기증한 바 있다. 이에 서울시립미술관과 서울시 문화본부는 협업을 통해 1970년대에서 2000년대에 이르는 작가의 예술기록 자원을 전시로 풀어내어, 자연, 삶, 예술의 통합이라는 관점에서 평생 끈질긴 퍼포머이자 꼼꼼한 아키비스트로서의 면모를 보여 온 작가를 재평가하는 계기를 마련하였다. 이번 전시는 아카이브와 관련된 본격적인 연구의 첫발을 내딛는 동시에 자연에 쉼 없이 열정적으로 다가가는 과정을 다성적 짜임새를 지닌 예술로 승화시킨 작가 임동식의 방식을 통합적으로 목도할 기회가 될 것이다. 더불어 이와 같은 시도가 사유 예술가로 불리길 희망하는 임동식에 대한 추가적인 연구로 이어지고, 향후 서울시립 미술 아카이브에서 전개될 프로젝트에 많은 이들이 관심을 갖는 계기가 되길 바란다.

출처 : 서울시립미술관 홈페이지 전시소개글

Rise Up Rim Dong Sik is a solo exhibition surveying the life-long practice of Rim Dong Sik (b. 1945), an artist who has consistently pursued an art world of his own integrating nature, life, and art as a persistent performer and meticulous archivist.

The title of the exhibition, Rise Up Rim Dong Sik, is inspired by two performances—Stand up, and Rise Up—presented at the first meeting of the Yatoo-Outdoor Field Art Research Association, held at the Geumgang, Gongju, 1981. It dynamically captures the monumental moment since which Rim has walked a path of his own. The exhibition is largely divided into four themes to follow the chronological flow and characteristics of works of the artist: Gesture, Flow, Village, and Poetic Notion. From resistance to reality and convention to performances of communion with nature and paintings that navigate between the realms of fact and imagination, the exhibition highlights an art world of the artist, who did not conform to the dominant tendency of the time and freely express his artistic vision.

In particular the artist’s archive in this exhibition is presented as pure creations to be systematically collected, categorized, stored and studied, as well as a cradle of significant artistic inspirations, and not as records that accumulate like sediments in the deep sea. In addition, the recursive summoning of the moment of artistic act that could have been forever forgotten becomes a new creative act transcending time beyond mere purpose of documentation and a product with unlimited expandability. This exhibition will be an opportunity to comprehensively witness the artistic methods of Rim, an artist who has transformed the numerous processes of approaching nature ceaselessly and passionately into an art.

몸짓 Gestures

Gestures represent the artist’s “body” and “act” of doing something, and symbolize fresh and vibrant energy in which the young artist’s unrefined struggles in seeking changes from existing forms are mixed with the pure nature that contrasts with the frustrating realities.

“My thirty-year devotion, Yatoo (field shot) means throwing to the field or being thrown to me from the field […] and aims to expand and reinterpret existing methodologies by shifting indoor-oriented art activities to outdoors.”

“Creating works in nature […] involves contents that are passive rather than active and ‘receptive’ rather than passive, accepting things that are thrown at you from nature, the origin of life.”

– Neuwerk, Germany, 1987

Because outdoor field art “exists temporarily” and disappears, how to “record and main the contents” have always been tasks for Rim, and “archiving” became the foundation for an effective method of completing such tasks.

몰입 Flow

The artworks shown in this section are the outputs from his studies at the University of Fine Arts at Hamburg (1981–1989). The works during this period, which were produced in a state of flow like the way a child is immersed in “play,” can be characterized and classified as follows: Sound-visual Play, llusion Play and Medium Play.

“The acts I perform […] are not intended or planned. […] I get so tense that I can’t breathe. […] When the pigeons seem to come but stop, it is so tense that you cannot breathe. It’s a one-on-one situation.”

“Drawing can be compared to throwing a little rock and creating great ripples. […] You lay out your own thoughts and try different things, and it is extremly fun. It is a state of flow.”

마을 Village

In the early 1990s in Wongol Village, Gongju, Rim begins a lifestyle that follows the ways of nature as in pre-civilization times.

“While I do art as an ‘act’, I become purified and newly opened by the village environment and the people who live amid their farming ‘work’.”

“In the aspect of essential matters for survival or living, painting and other acts done in nature would be useless […] but they boost or purify people by the rhythm of mind, space, and ease of tension. Opening up those points could be the role of visual arts. It would be truly desolate without these things.”

시상 Poetic Notion

Rim’s performances are in progress. His paintings are a new “interpretation” of his past performances in nature, which goes beyond “reenactment.” They are like a poem in which the traces of memories and emotions uncaptured by technical media such as photographs or videos are reinterpreted and amplified.

“Valuable advice from people who has lived in nature all their life makes me realize once more my own artificiality as a so-called artist and the limitations of subsandard nonsense fabrications, compared to the honest, experience-based gazes of them. I admire the eyes of people who do not paint.”

“From trembling of grass to chirping of grasshoppers, singing of birds, fish, wind brushing through trees, stars in the night sky, flowers of spring, heat of summer, high sky of autumn, and cold temperatures of winter, […] within the rhythm of Yatoo looking at vast open space and change of time from four seasons, it is hoped that we would acquire
minds like nature that are strong, good, clean, and clear.”

– Written in a classroom of the former Gongju Girls’ High School while listening to the night shower falling on the growing pumpkin leaves
of late July 1981-