Joohong Kang paints libraries. This statement must be clearer. Why a library? How can a library be recognized within a painting? And more than anything, where/what is the library?
Every book has a name but books in a library also have index codes. The Korean Decimal Classification Table systematically divides all existing information into ten categories with numbers. Kang appropriates the library classification system that decorates the first letter, from 000 to 900. The artist documented the first pages in the first and last book of each category at the National Library of Korea, modified the images and silkscreen printed into channels and then transformed them into paintings. Pieces were complete with or without the process of adding strokes following the information gained from the books. The painting set leaning under the gallery associates with the footnotes of passages in a book (‹footnote: 000~999›), and the stretched out string associates to a bookmark string. Through these processes, a library, and the system that constitutes the library, folded into the interior of painting in Kang’s practice.
Library is outside(le dehor). In his 1960s literary theory, Michel Foucault said that the language space at the time was characterized in a library-like form. Yet the library he refers to was the imagined site in Jorge Luis Borges’ short fiction, the Babel’s library. It was regarded as a place where everything that could be said was already said, where every language that could be thought of, imagined, and could be imagined in the future was found and discovered, where language multiplied infinitely in itself, doubled in its form, and repeated endlessly.1 All libraries some way or other resemble Babel's; no one can read ‘all’ library languages, thus cannot know what is really written there.
Kang’s practice to illustrate a library and actively subordinate the classification system of knowledge as a rule of painting presupposes intended silence. From some point on, painting refuses to become indiscriminate illustration, and linger on the issue of limiting originality. Painting attempted to fully abandon the internalities it could have and sometimes asked to be unintentionally subjugated to arbitrary systems and rules. This may be because he realizes that painting can only survive in today's space where ‘everything that can be said’ is said. In libraries, whatever is said is already a repetition of what has already been said, and Kang rather chooses to jump toward a library.
Raymond Roussel’s novel overflows with wordplay and tricks (procédé). Roussel hid complex techniques throughout his text, such as calling out two or three interpretations within a word. Interestingly, Roussel's reader notices that the text had riddles, wordplay, and multiple actions of language through it, but could hardly notice how they appeared in any sentence. Roussel himself was unable to fully explain his text because this method was used so frequently and arbitrarily. That led his reader to be “deceived by the consciousness that there is a secret rather than being deceived by a secret.2” Secrets trigger anxiety, and such anxiety comes from the fact that one language may multiply into something else, and that one language contains infinite interpretation. Rules always become a maze, and the artist gets lost. Kang Joohong paints libraries––this statement must be clearer. Kang demands the library to paint the library. Just like whoever wants to stay perfectly inside all laws and rules are considered neuroblinders, the "principle of spatial continuity" of precisely arranging the infinite books of infinite libraries is a marker of pure madness. Pure madness was considered close to the truth up until the early seventeenth-century. Only the ones obsessed with pure madness can tell the truth.3
Principal of Spatial Continuity rearranges contemporary painting’s operation system using libraries as a medium. The artist explored the history of print and interchanged that with art history in his process. Silkscreen was a medium interchanging painting and print technology, and opened up the possibility to interchange painting history. In the exhibition, information and sense, library and museum, painting and text, and print and strokes each interchange. These unopposed terms find common ground by revealing what isn’t told as much as what is told.
1 Hironari Takeda, Fuko's Aesthetics, translated by Kim Sang-woon, Hyunsil Munhwa, 2018, pp. 57.
2 Same copy, pp. 82.
3 Same copy, pp. 88.
