Kim Kang Yong is a painter who was born, raised and educated in the Republic of Korea. While his vision as a painter is uniquely his own, Kim's conceptual approach to the pictorial surface is invariably consistent with the kind of abstract space that echoes through the history of Korean painting in the late Joesun Dynasty. In this sense, he is more consistent with contemporary artists such as Seo Bo Park and Hyoung Keun Yun than with Western forms of realism or hyperrealism. While some Western critics might readily place Kim's precisely rendered paintings in either a late modern or post-modern category, I am unable to excise these paintings from their indigenous Asian culture. Even so, fully explain these "Reality+Images" - as Kim titles them- is not entirely outside the realm of Western influence. Clearly, one can detect the use of extended forms of linear perspective introduced by Piero della Francesca and Uccello in the Italian Renaissance. As │ study these grid-like walls and dissembled piles of bricks cascading from the top edge or projecting from the bottom of the picture plane, │ try and contemplate why this is happening. In other words, what is intention behind these bricks? The temptation is to determine some kind of meaning through the choice of the artist's subject matter before comprehending how the paintings are actually constructed. Kim Kang Yong's paintings are not only concerned with precisely rendered images; they are primarily about space and the illusion that gives this space significance. While Kim may appear to use a mathematical approach in order to achieve precision in the way he enumerates every brick according to light and shadow, the fundamental concept is not at all mathematical. He is subsuming the application of Renaissance perspective and Cartesian logic to a concept that is essentially intuitive, that is, formed by meditation that emanates from Buddhist thought. Kim is interested in emptying the mind of all distractions through his paintings. The discipline involved in constructing a painting that is literally built from Western perspective and logic, yet at some time is entirely without preconception, requires a supreme focus and concentration. If we see nothing in these paintings, then we have come closer to the mark than if we see only bricks. From Kim's angel of vision, these paintings are about space and illusion, yet they are empty and without figuration. Ultimately, the space depicted on the canvas becomes the space of what the Buddhists call "no mind" or the mind emptied of all distraction. This is the goal of meditation and, for Kim; these paintings are evidence of the process.

There is a tendency to see things in an apposite way in the West, rather than see the differences within Eastern culture. Western viewers who embrace economic globalization tend to view all cultures the same way through the mirror of commercial media. Given the aggressive globalization of contemporary art, largely propelled through the Biennial system, there is the impulse to try and capture the elusiveness of art and thus to tie it down in some way. Asian countries appear particularly susceptible to this tendency, but art cannot be so easily constrained, limited, or tied down. Art cannot be proven to be one thing or one idea. In this sense, Kim's paintings are neither fully representational nor abstract. They appear to hover somewhere in-between. This in-between space is seen in relation to what Buddhists understand as emptiness the space of the non-category that is given to the ever-flowing transience of nature. In short, I believe these paintings to be extraordinary. 1 believe they are exceptional in how they test our innate perceptions and incite us to consider painting as a form of sensory knowledge. │ like the notion that painting is something that people should live with and reflect upon during the course of everyday life. As the Symbolist poet Mallame superbly stated: "To suggest is to create, but to define is to destroy."

In writing about Kim Kang Yong, I don't want to re-view these paintings before they are viewed. Viewing precedes re-viewing. Mallarme give us the courage not to destroy the potential of what the viewer sees, rather to re-open doors of perception that reveal the truth in painting. In writing about Kim's work, I continue to see his paintings in terms of a window-an opening into another world where the structure of space is explored in terms of meditation. Indeed, if we trust the allegory of Claude Lorain in seventeenth century France, then painting is in need a window of illusions. There is a connection between Claude and the space painters of Korea, an appropriate means toward perception that does not dispel the emptiness, the stillness, and the quest for an internal nature in Kim's work. My initial encounter with these "Reality+Images" of Kim was not entirely clear. I was visually confused when I first saw the reproductions in a catalog. What was I seeing? Piles of bricks? The illusion was so convincing. Were these paintings of common bricks about formal composition? If not, then what was their conceptual intention? Was there a Political message lurking beneath the surface? Was there an optical discourse of some kind? Were these paintings trying to evoke a sense of order and disorder in human history? Did they represent the antipodes of construction and rubble generated through war and natural disaster? What were they really about? The more questions I asked about Kim's paintings, the more discovered something about myself. One of the truly marvelous aspects of writing about art of this caliber is the possibility of re-awakening the need for expression and discovery in painting. As I examined these remarkable and somewhat mysterious images, they begin to seep into the fibers of my consciousness my sense of reality, even my role as an art critic. At the outset, I realized that my self-questioning was too logical, too prescribed, too psychological. I was searching for dualities, something based on subject, the self and the other, the perceiver and the perceived, but none of these dualities seemed to work-at least not in the manner that I intended. The paintings used bricks as their subject matter, but, as later discovered, the bricks were really an illusion-a window into another world, the world of painting. In the most literal sense, there was nothing there except light and dark shapes and the reference to an ordered or chaotic geometry painted over an evenly spread earth pigment mixed with fine sand and binders. Kim Kang Yong does not paint these bricks based on observation. The entire scenario unfolds in his mind, in his mind's eye. Beginning in the upper left comer, he moves slowly across the canvas through a kind of scanning, until he reaches the lower right corner. This is not a virtual act, but an act of tactile engagement. The process is focused on imaging a surface of "bricks", while registering emptiness in the mind's eye. The artist sustains an awareness of form at every step along the way. The light and dark crevices are all invented and inverted based on the artist's mental awareness, through the process of memory. Every brick is created within the mind and is based on what he has learned through the observation of light in the external visual world. Nothing is copied, photographically or otherwise.

Every "brick" is an invention of the mind. Each element, each shape, is brought out from the neutral ground of the gritty pigment through applied modulations, thus creating a space out of emptiness, an observable space that will eventually be identified in the vernacular as common "bricks". These is no deliberate formal ordering; nothing preconceived, other than a generalized concept of a grid, of rubble, and various combinations and permutations. One might consider each "brick" as a kind of mental module that has achieved degree of tactile manifestation, a "reality" beyond the normative state of perception and Being. Kim's paintings are not merely a regurgitation of academic methods or techniques appropriated from "Western style" painting (as it is called in Korean art schools). There is starkness of color in these paintings, a uniformity of color that persists on "ground zero"-as discussed by the French semiotician Roland Barthes. In other words, Mr. Kim has taken painting down to a new level, to an essential level, where we are forced to re-examine its foundations in a new way, maybe through an Eastern perspective. In certain respects, this has a strong link to Eastern philosophy, particularly in traditional aesthetics. Kim Kang Yong's "ground zero" is not only theoretical; it has strong meditative and prac-tical roots. One may see these paintings as having a link to some aspects of Buddhism. The images while seemingly opaque upon first glance, they will eventually emerge - if one gives them the necessary time - within a heightened complexity of form. They are paintings not unrelated to Cezanne's "still lifes" or, for that matter, to the hermetic Cubist paintings of Picasso and Braque, specifically those painted between 1909-1911. Some will argue that on technical ground alone, they are a tour de force-which may be true, but technique in painting (as in any artistic medium) cannot be isolated from ideas or feelings. This concept is too limited. Being a Korean who fully aware of these limitations, Mr. Kim understands his work not only in terms of technique. He is searching for something more profound, something more open to reality. He goes deeply into the realm of the human spirit in search of an alternative world. Like all significant works of art, Kim's cultural specificity is embedded within his paintings. yet holds the capacity to extend beyond any limits. In this sense, culture is perhaps more readily tangible than heritage. It can be seen and felt more readily by the human sensory apparatus. Culture, for Kim Kang Yong, precedes form and is directly attributed to one's sense of identity. Leonardo's culture is not that of Hokusai's, and Pollock's is not Picasso's. For some viewers, the use of bricks as subject matter in a painting would be seen a relatively neutral. Simply stated, it is. There is nothing complicated at all about their meaning. Like the Cubists, these is no real variety in terms of color. The emphasis is given to the abstraction of reality. These are paintings about form and space and, finally, about emptiness. They are painted in an articulate and precise manner. They are exceptional works of art.