Artist Lecture: Kim Jin Ha

Kim Jin Ha is an artist and curator specializing in Korean woodblock prints, with an interest in contemporary woodblock prints. This past month he gave a lecture in the University Library Gallery on modern and contemporary woodblock prints in conjunction with The Land and The People: Contemporary Korean Prints exhibition. Jin Ha is also the Director of Namu Art, in Seoul, South Korea.

We began his lecture with a condensed history of the woodblock print, primarily in Korea. There is a difference, he told us, in the ways in which Koreans and Americans create works of art. The primary difference between the two is in their "state of mind". Korea has been in a complex state of political conflict for the last 100 years, and it is this conflict that creates a "cultural sadness" in each Korean's psyche. The people of the United States have experienced an era of relatively stable politics, history, as well as mindset. Because of this cultural sadness and unique state of mind, much of the work coming out of Korea maintains a certain aesthetic quality and sensibility individual to the Korean people.

Prints from woodblocks were first used for newspapers and advertisements in the last 1800's. The first Korean newspaper was printed from woodblocks in 1883, with the first modern geography textbook following in 1894. Shortly after that, the first novel was translated into Korean and printed that same year. 1896 brought about the first moral textbook in modern Korean, and in 1899 the first advertisement image was seen in newspapers. Korea's liberation from Japan in 1945 brought about a new era, with increased communist influence and a larger output of fine art.

This was a difficult lecture for someone hard of hearing such as myself. I sat near the front of the room, but still had trouble hearing and understanding the information. Jin Ha does not speak English, and as such he had the assistance of a translator. Unfortunately, he was the only one of the two with a microphone, and his translator was fairly soft spoken and frequently uncertain about what she was translating. To add to this, halfway through the lecture the projector experienced technical difficulties and began showing only blank versions of the original slides. Sadly, the lecture was concluded early before much more was able to be covered. Despite the difficult nature of it's presentation, it was very interesting to learn about Korea's cultural and political history and the ways in which in continues to contribute to the unique quality of work produced by those of it's ancestry.