The Constellation of Memory: Kim Whanki's Poetic Blue Abstraction

An immediate glance at this painting took me to the first painting I stood infront of. Seasons of the Soul by Selvaraj Ganesh. Both dots, except one is colourful, and the other is monochromatic. And the next instance I see a mirage of a clown, with a long nose, sharp moustache and tongue popped out. It then deconstructs into a grid of checks with 7 squares in width and 9 squares in length. It feels like a hypnodisc, perfectly still but taking me ahead and behind in time.

While I kept tossing what all I saw in it, I landed on what I used to draw in my middle school biology notebook. A cell. And I remember writing beside it 'Building Block of Life.' Now comes the brilliance in the coherence between the question in the name of the painting and in the known/unknown answer in the painting, and the poetry in it. Where, in What Form, Shall I Meet You Again, and a massive compilation of cells. A tree, a leaf, a petal? However the form might be, it all unravels to this. To life.

The infinite blue dot, each one meticulously hand painted, and squares around the dots with heavily diluted oil paint in turpentine (resin from trees) blending and bleeding into one another mimics co-existence and unity. Inspired from the poem written by his friend Kim Kwang-seop, 'In The Evening, this painting could also be taken as the one searching for a particular stars in an ocean of stars. Or this could be taken as an answer, or acceptance of how one perceives the other, the placebo effect of "The One" residing in every cell.

"Among a multitude of stars, one stares down at me.
Among a multitude of people, I stare up at that one star.

In these lines are we the star looking down at the living beings(cells, per se), or are we the cell looking up at the stars hoping to find connection in the bright, already-dead star(end).

Why blue? Why blue paired with blue? What seems to be like a natural colour drawn from earth minerals, is a industrial, chemical formulated Western Oil Paint. This also is an agent for depicting the placebo effect of finding the one from a very similar kind of mass.

What gave a man the patience to paint infinite dots, and squares around them? It is said that each dot was for a person he missed from Korea while he was living in New York. It is the break from the suffocation of reaching heights, and the guilt of leaving home behind. A very perplexed, unresolvable blend of emotions. This is a meditative way of finding his answers. And I wonder what prevailed.

Kim Whanki died in 1974, four years after this painting, before he could finish his last canvas. The question in the title — Where, in What Form, Shall I Meet You Again — was never answered by him either. Where, in What Form, Shall I Meet You Again?