Shin Sung Hy (1948-2009) is today a renowned artist in the Korean art world, where he has had numerous exhibitions and his work is included in many public collections. He is also an important figure in the cultural exchange between his homeland and France, where he lived from 1980 until his death in 2009. His work, however, has been relatively little seen in his adopted country, despite a particularly rich and fruitful dialogue with the French art scene. While Shin Sung Hy's work maintains clear, albeit distant, connections with dansaekhwa , a Korean pictorial movement that emerged in the 1970s and literally translates as "monochrome painting," it is above all deeply influenced by the Supports/Surfaces movement, an ephemeral yet influential collective of French artists active between 1969 and 1971.

Deconstructing Painting:
In the early 1970s, Shin Sung Hy's colorful, figurative oil paintings on canvas seemed to stand in stark contrast to the minimalist aesthetic and the new ways his Dansaekhwa counterparts were using to interact with their supports . Certainly, by 1974, Shin Sung Hy had significantly tempered his palette, opting for trompe-l'œil paintings depicting burlap sacks in shades of brown. However, these works did not represent a rallying to the dominant trends in Korea. They retained the representational function of painting, abandoned by Dansaekhwa,  in order to question the very nature of pictorial production. The absurd doubling, through trompe-l'œil , of a burlap sack painted on a burlap sack introduces a dissonance between what is represented and the nature of the actual object presented to the viewer. Shin Sung Hy continued this work after arriving in France in 1980, where he hoped to have more freedom to pursue his research. Very quickly, he returned to color in works that constituted a deconstruction, even a literal destruction, of painting . These works were made up of painted cardboard torn into pieces, then glued onto Plexiglas, onto another piece of cardboard, or onto each other.

Return to Painting:
While tearing up a pre-existing work constitutes a radical and explicit questioning of painting, both as a practice and as an object, repositioning the pieces of cardboard into a rectangle on a Plexiglas sheet or assembling them to reconstitute a support demonstrates Shin Sung Hy's desire to maintain a dialogue with this discipline. Shin Sung Hy returned to easel painting in the 1990s. Certainly, he continued to produce cardboard works for a few years, regularly incorporating found elements into his pieces and continuing to experiment with his supports. However, these supports were now most often canvases stretched on frames . A pronounced taste for color led Shin Sung Hy to create vibrant and warm abstract compositions, whose backgrounds, dominated by yellows, reds, pinks, and oranges, are punctuated and structured by stains and lines.

For more information please head to the Cernuschi Museum website.

Tagged 14/04.