Printmaking as a medium and its multiplicity
Participating artistsㅣJung Hun Kang, Sung Soo Koo, Sang Ku Kim, Nam Sin Kwak, Young Jin Park, Soon Shil Baik, Ji Yen Lee,  Sung Dam Hong 

BSSM housing major print works from contemporary Korean print history plans to hold exhibitions constantly to showcase new interpretations on printmaking from diverse perspectives. This exhibition will be a first attempt to explore the extended import of printmaking as a medium, rather than as a genre, deriving from multiplicity, the most historical, central theme in discussion on the hallmarks of printmaking as a medium. Printmaking enables artists to depart from the uniqueness of painting and sculpture. It adopts multiplicity for the expansion of space impossible to attain in painting, which makes it date back to the history of printing techniques and also compared to infinitesimal digital reproduction of the times. The form and purpose to produce multiple images from a matrix can be different. The matrix can reproduce images and messages limitlessly as in mass production for mass communication and it can also limit the multiplicity as ‘editions’ bearing a scarcity of art distinguished it from mechanical reproduction. To Hong Sung Dam, who adopted the medium of printmaking for the wide propagation of his messages within the stream of Minjungmisul (people’s art) woodcut print of the 1980s, woodblock or rubber plate had a strong purpose for spreading pressing social messages, quickly and extensively. In his May Gwangju Democratic Uprising series, plates document historical fact, prints bring recorded messages to time and space where the general public gathers, and an act of printing with a plate is a way of social communication. Unlike Hong, Baik Soon Shil has explored the medium of printmaking as an extension of modernist painting. To the artist, a repetitive act of printmaking is like a new language of expression. Her print series have communicated with the general public by being published serially in mass-print materials like a magazine, transcending the arena of fine arts. To the artist however, the concept of multiplicity in printmaking sets her art free from the limit of sole-ness that painting retains, but the notion of editions makes printmaking a way of artistic expression. In Hong Sung Dam’s prints, multiplicity is toward society, whereas Baik has addressed the multiplicity of printmaking within the internal logic of fine art. As such, printmaking has multiplicity with different characteristics. In all their prints however, a plate or a matrix is their departure point. Like the camera lens, the plate is a physical frame intermediating the artist and the world, suggestive of an accidental, controlled process of pressing and printing and extended temporality. Moreover, the space and time in the plate encapsulate immediate, individual traces, envisaging the possibility of integration into work in other genres through collaboration with other artists. Prior to discussing the possibility of “plates”, which can be extended through the keywords of the times such as temporality, process, and collaboration, Kim Sang Ku has adhered to their most primal form of existence. His woodcut print minimalizes the distance between plate and artist, directly revealing the elements of materiality and action. In his prints, you can feel the texture of the wooden plate as well as the attitude and the movement of the artist toward it. Simple knife lines imply the moment a knife touches the plate, and the large black-and-white planes unveil wood grain. While Kim’s printmaking is a potent implication of a plate’s relational existence with the artist, Koo Sung Soo’s photography seems as the metaphor of the mechanism of plates working as a free-standing matrix. Koo’s Photogenic Drawing series is a conceptual presentation of the mechanism of film in photography - like the plate in printmaking. He creates an intaglio image by pressing an actual plant on a clay plate, makes a relief by pouring plaster into the intaligo and then photographs the painted relief. This long process of production ranging from a concave to a convex plate, from negative film to digital print comments on the true nature of photography to imprint and represent three dimensional world by appropriating sculptural, pictorial processes. This process also sounds like a metaphoric comment on the matrix of the print media, on time and processes accumulated on the plates in which the time and space of an object is filtered, condensed, and made two-dimensional by the medium of a two-dimensional plate, turning again to three-dimensional space and time by being reproduced by printing. The multiplicity of printmaking deriving from the existence of such “plate” generates a relationship at the moment one becomes two. This characteristic enables us to look back on diverse aspects of a relationship that is lineal and absolute or situational and relative: a relationship between original plate and edition; a relationship between edition and edition; and a relationship between multiple editions and different viewers, places, time, and contexts. As in the relational order between plate and print, Kwak Nam Sin addresses the shadow as the theme of his work. Shadows are subordinate to realistic things and can always be in existence in relation with something. However, the shadows transforming all into black planes attain freedom as a signifier, remaining out of a one-to-one relationship. Kwak’s sculpture and painting presenting suggestive scenes with such shadows, especially with the shadows of people, can be quoted as a conceptual question regarding printmaking in that his works are not only made in the printmaking method of stencil but also the relation between reality and shadow and can be interpreted as the relation between plate and edition, edition and edition. The element of the viewer brings forth a more relative, situational relationship in printmaking. When editions of an image from one matrix are seen by viewers in different places and times, that image comes to have diverse contexts at the same time. Park Young Jin produces works regarded as sculptures at a standstill, but they become furniture when a viewer interacts with them. She takes note of the process by which the meaning and understanding of a particular work of art can change depending on the specific situation and the person viewing the work. In her furniture sculpture, different types of screens are put between two people facing each other as if playing a game, and the character and relation of their gaze continuously react and change in different ways. It seems to reflect the true nature of plates as an intermediary between the world of objects and artist and viewer, and the desire of printmaking to make a relationship with the viewer through multiple distribution and communication. When the multiplicity of printmaking is seen as something to create diverse relationships, it is set free from a mere reproduction and meets the rich elements of digital media such as combination, editing, and modification. As the digital media discovers a turning point in thinking through possibilities of modification and variations in wide and free range rather than putting weight on infinite reproduction, the multiplicity of printmaking is a clue to such a turning point, transcending sole-ness. Kang Jung Hun showcases the multiplicity in an analog manner. He represents fragments of a spectacle urban scene taken as a snap shot in copperplate prints and installs multiples of prints together. These images of editions are derived from the same matrix but they do not seem simply repeating as reproduction, but look modified and proliferated through changes in arrangements. His work displays in a new way an extended space where the same images encapsulating a specific space-time are distanced from the original photographs through the simple physical method of composing and arranging them from diverse angles. While Kang explores the multiplicity of print media in connection with urbanity, Lee Ji Yen shows public spaces in a city where repetitive actions take place, marrying this with the digital media available for infinite repetition. Repetitively pressing the shutter, Lee captures the anonymous public moving in one direction at places such as a bridge or an escalator. Each photograph cuts and blends numerous scenes captured at one place and reduces them to one constituent unit, forging a new geometric space through editing, modification, and rearrangement. Her digital photographs look like abstract patterns from a distance. In these photographs, a single space-time captured by a viewfinder vanishes, time intersects and overlaps, and space infinitely repeats and extends. Aesthetics of the multiplicity inherent in prints derives from the fact that a print can have multiple existences varying in form and traits, departing form painting’s uniqueness stemming from one image, and with this a print enters a new relation and naturally has a point of contact with other new flexible mediums. Printmaking contains an undertone as a media to make us reconsider the concept of art and the way of thinking that cannot be limited as a form of art. Starting from discussions on the multiplicity of printmaking that this exhibition concentrates on, we will shed light on print as a contemporary media to encapsulate a variety of discourses. This endeavor is associated with such questions as what the prints as media can do to analyze our age accurately, rather than a mere effort to bring established prints to the present age.