[Artist] Reminiscent of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Film :: The alienation and loneliness of Sung Sik Min
Contemporary art @ Korea/Artist 2008/04/19 19:29Sung Sik Min_A Carpenter’s House_2008_oil on canvas_112.1 x 162.2 cm
Michelangelo Antonioni (1912-2007) is a movie director who represented the Italian film industry in the 60’s. Antonioni gained international fame when he was awarded at the Cannes Film Festival during an era when Pop Art and Nouvelle Vague were in trend. Along with Jean-Luc Godard, who was profoundly influenced by the culture of the 60’s Pop Art, Antonioni embodied the art of 60’s cinema. In a way, Antonioni was an abstract expressionist. The birth of motion picture in the 19th century was closely related to art and the vessel of progress of film industry was shared with Modernism.
Responsible for the creation of countless masterpieces such as Il Deserto Rosso, L'Avventura, Blowup, and L'eclipse, Antonioni was a director who savored his privileges to convey thoughts and emotions through cinema. The screen became his canvas and the camera was his brush.
Alienation and loneliness were the recurring themes of his work, and Antonioni used arrangement of urban buildings and objects to portray empty spaces on the screen. Scenes in his movies are meticulously maneuvered around spaces. Il Deserto Rosso, in which the Color-Field Abstraction of Mark Rothko was reenacted, is presented to the viewers like a series of artwork. A matière-like gigantic ship leaving a wharf, interior of a factory machine chamber influenced by Color-Field Abstraction, lonely and deserted alleyway dowsed in grey, and plastered wall in an empty lounge all fill the screen to stimulate our emotions the way Antonioni intended when he used the camera as his paintbrush. Elements of Installation Art and Color-Field Abstraction appear in Blowup, which demonstrates the technology of photography, and paintings always comprise parts of the mise en scène in its cinematic space.
Sung Sik Min_A Carpenter’s House_2008_oil on canvas_112.1 x 162.2 cm Sung Sik Min_A Carpenter’s House_2008_oil on canvas_112.1 x 162.2 cm
For me, the painting of Sung-Sik Min was intractably reminiscent of Antonioni. His utilization of spatial arrangement and empty spaces was pleasing to the eye. His control of colors close to primary colors and spatial utilization of Minimalism, through which the architectures and large ships are only displayed partially rather than in entirety, can be mistaken to be calming to the senses but in its aesthetic core, premonitions and apprehension prevail just as they did as the subjects of Antonioni’s films.
Min’s technique of spatial structuring is similar to that of Antonioni. Although a façade of serenity may be seen on the outside, apprehension lies on the inside. Discerning viewers will identify the pleasantly disturbing composition achieved by the arrangement of objects on the canvas. Min challenges our aesthetic values through stimulation of the imagination by presenting us with a story full of unfamiliar territories which Antonioni loved so much in his work. The unfamiliar territories of Antonioni and Min convey human apprehension. In an empty space with nobody around, what we get is not a sense of serenity but a tangible grasp of the reality of solitude in our lives. One may be reminded of the solitary space of Edward Hopper, but his work does not surpass that of Antonioni in terms of aesthetic boundaries. Thus we anticipate the prolificacy of Sung-Sik Min who became known to us in 2005 at a young age.
Art Critic_IAN
