Kim En Joong

Sacred Light and Energy 
Park Young-taek
(Professor, Kyonggi University; Art Critic)

1.
The geniuses of the Renaissance resolved the aesthetic problems involved in relocating three-dimensional objects onto a two-dimensional plane. However, the problem that remained was one of depth. They had not yet discovered a perspective or chiaroscuro capable of reproducing the anguish or remorse of the inner world. Caravaggio sought to resolve this problem. He employed a technique that conveyed religious meaning by contrasting darkness, signifying the secular world, with intense light, signifying holiness. This is Tenebrism—known in Italian art history as the “manner of darkness” (Tenebroso). By utilizing extreme illumination through Tenebrism, Caravaggio added spiritual characteristics to Renaissance perspective. One of his techniques for staging light was Kellerlicht (“cellar light”), which falls obliquely from above. This dramatic use of light and shade is known in Italian as Chiaroscuro.
Above all, the emergence of such dramatic light forcefully compels recognition of the existence of the invisible God. In the Western artistic tradition that reproduces the text of the Bible, light thus provides a place that brightly illuminates God’s existence and His seat. This tradition extends to Vermeer, who visualized God’s grace and the mystery of the soul by imparting density and luminous purity to small spaces within the canvas through shimmering fragments of color; to Chagall, who revealed biblical scenes or dreams and fantasies through fantastic uses of color; and finally, to color abstraction, which seeks to represent the invisible sublime. Western art has long aimed for the appearance of the invisible world through the visible one. It is an artistic approach to a world beyond what is seen—a world filled with invisibility and ambiguity. The desire to represent a mysterious world, or God as an invisible absolute being, belongs to this lineage.
2.
Father Kim En Joong’s paintings are abstractions in which figuration is absent. Above all, the flatness of the picture plane and the materiality of paint are emphasized. The dazzling surface, coated in white, strongly implies the flatness of the canvas. Over this surface, various colors seep, flow, and spread. Through these traces, the screen is composed into an infinite space, a sacred space, a space filled with light. The physical plane is suddenly transformed into a mysterious, spiritual space. The artist seeks to intuitively unfold the flow of emotion, spirit, and consciousness upon the canvas.
These paintings, created almost spontaneously without a priori conception or preparatory sketches, appear intended to reveal his inner self as unreservedly as possible. What makes this possible is the concentration and viscosity of the diluted paint. While the paint permeates into the flat canvas—functioning as a flat, stain-based mode of painting that emphasizes the plane—the overlapping and accumulation of thin layers simultaneously form countless strata, creating multilayered depth. He persistently cultivates a certain depth without violating the condition of flatness. At the same time, these elements imply the radiation of innumerable lights.
Meanwhile, the distinctive composition—where colors are distributed across the screen and blank spaces (yeobaek) are left throughout a surface in which the hierarchy between center and periphery has been erased—is particularly compelling. The traces of paint scattered across a plane where the relationship between center and margin is ambiguous cultivate their own spaces through diverse expressions. They generate free territories that are not subordinated to the whole. This serves as a metaphor for the will toward freedom—the refusal to be subsumed by totality.
3.
Resembling Abstract Expressionism, which reveals the artist’s actions upon the canvas surface, these paintings bear the distinct imprint of the artist’s gestures and bodily movements as he anchors paint to the screen. The artist’s act—his action itself—constitutes the content of the painting. The sensation of his psychological state at the moment of working relies on paint and color to project his body improvisationally. Fluid paint floats across the surface, assuming various expressions.
The traces of writhing paint, shimmering with brilliant and beautiful colors, approach the viewer like living organisms. Although they possess no specific form, they are filled with infinite possibilities and move toward a continuously generative mode of existence. The traces of paint do not refer to a particular image; rather, they repeat the processes of spreading, flowing downward, and coagulating, while remaining richly expressive in themselves. The screen, upon which the physical properties of paint have settled, embodies multiple processes of change within the flow of gravity and time. While applied and positioned artificially by the artist, it simultaneously maps the passage of time and the process through which material forms itself spontaneously. Here, painting is realized through the correspondence between the artist’s intention and natural phenomena. In this way, artificiality and non-contrivance (nature) are intertwined. Intentional attempts and accidental effects are entangled. Between them, a landscape is born like a miracle.
4.
The artist cautiously intervenes in the desolate screen to create traces of color and light, then retreats back into the canvas. Upon the ground shining in pure white, paint and color suddenly spread and coagulate. The painting straddles the boundary between nothingness and being, fluctuating between visibility and invisibility. Sharp planes overlap, allowing color to leak out from between them, or dramatic situations are staged in which colors overlap, stain, and spread. It is a scene in which something inevitably seeps out from within the planar surface, as if flowing through cracks, as if boundaries were being erased and collapsed, dissecting the screen.
Against a background of relatively prominent negative space, brilliant colors dance with vitality. The scattering and pulsation of color and light are sensed first. This strongly recalls the paintings of Sam Francis. It is my view that the artist explores the essence of emotion through color and actively employs negative space as a core structural element of painting. Here, color completely departs from the object and becomes self-sufficient. At the same time, colors partially intermingle and harmonize, creating captivating flows, rhythms, and expressions. The artist demonstrates a free compositional approach alongside an extreme sensitivity to color.
As colors suddenly emerge within the silence-filled void, they reveal something akin to a gesture. They are also lights seeping out from the dazzling white of the ground. The impression is that the background itself is generating light. Here, the staging of the ground and the color and paint placed upon it appears ultimately directed toward the emergence of sacred light. Light, as if tearing through the surface of the canvas, fills the space completely. The colors flowing across the screen render the space dynamic. Consequently, the canvas is brimming with energy.
Father Kim En Joong is often called the “Painter of Light.” His act of painting as a priest ultimately corresponds closely with his faith. Through painting, he visualizes God’s grace and existence; he responds to his faith through painting. Alongside his canvas works, he is also widely known as a stained-glass artist. This, too, forms part of his practice as a priest-painter. The cathedral embodies the presence of God—appearing as light and sound—through stained glass and organ music. Required by the architectural need for structural durability, stained glass simultaneously fills the dark interior of the cathedral with dazzling light; as it pours down like fallout onto the bodies of the gathered congregation, it movingly enacts the descent of God. Father Kim En Joong’s paintings are produced within the same context. The representation of God’s existence emerges mysteriously and sublimely, borrowing the form of abstraction filled with light and color.

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