When Sun K. Kwak was a young girl growing up in Seoul, her trips to the art gallery could just as easily have been scenes from the film The Sixth Sense. While others went about their business marvelling at the array of figurative art, all she saw were dead people.
"I didn't feel anything, there was no life. They were just stiff and dead," she recalls. "It looks like a dead body, that's how I felt. I always wanted to give some life into it."
How to imbue her own art with life was a question Kwak wrestled with for years, first during her undergraduate art studies in Seoul and then as a master's student in New York, where she moved in 1993.
Now, for the first time, her work has come to Canada with the site-specific installation, Untying Space_CUAG, a solo exhibition at Ottawa's Carleton University Art Gallery.
"As a painter, I felt distance between myself and the material. So when I came to New York, I explored all kinds of ideas. Then, one morning, I wake up and all of a sudden the masking tape pops in my mind."
It was 1995. Kwak remembers buying a roll and barely being able to contain herself as she hurried to school to try it out. Once there, she immediately knew she had found what she was looking for.
"I was satisfied for the first time. I felt that, oh, it's just coming out from my fingers, like black ink, it's so natural, it's so free."
Kwak uses black masking tape as a medium and that has now become her signature style. Her latest work spans 24 metres of previously blank walls.
In the years since,
Kwak's "space drawings," as she calls them, have attracted audiences around the world, from New York's Guggenheim Museum to Berlin, Tokyo and Seoul.
The latest in her series of Untying Space installations, the Carleton work is a turbulent cascade of black lines that swirl and churn their way across 24 metres of previously blank walls, reinventing the space as they spill through it.
"I make a living thing," Kwak declares, speaking softly and deliberately during a break from her work on the Carleton installation. "Untying means giving freedom. I free myself and the space from all the boring restrictions and the space is transformed."
After covering sections of wall with bands of tape up to six inches wide, Kwak rips off jagged strips, placing them elsewhere in the design, leaving the black tape and the white gaps to symbiotically journey through the space. Virtually all of it is improvised.
It's tough work. Slight and wiry, with her hair pulled back in a bun and usually attired in clothing as black as her masking tape, Kwak is unrelenting in her intensity and focus, gliding back and forth, pausing, reflecting, alternately attacking and retreating from the wall, moving up and down on ladders and lifts, as she tears at the tape with controlled ferocity.
The process seems to possess her, erasing any distinction between the artist and her art.
"I so wanted to create something that was alive," she explains. "I tried to remove the distance between myself and the material and try to empty so much of myself into the work so it has a vivid energy, life and movement."
After so arduously filling her creations with life, Kwak destines them to mortality, insisting the tape simply be stripped off and tossed away at the conclusion of an exhibition.
The pace is frenetic. The
Carleton piece required 100 hours to complete. Her monumental 2009 installation at the Brooklyn Museum, which used five kilometres of tape, took 280 hours, the equivalent of five straight weeks of eight-hour days. Physically recovering from an installation can take up to two months.
Then, after so arduously filling her creations with life, Kwak destines them to mortality, insisting the tape simply be stripped off and tossed away at the conclusion of an exhibition.
"They just pull it off and it becomes a ball of garbage no matter how big it is and it's just thrown away, like our life. It comes, grows and goes. You are left with the empty space, but you never look at it the same because the life was there. You have this footprint in your mind."
Kwak feels none of her success would have happened had she not left Korea for the United States. Like the "untying" of the spaces into which she pours her art, she believes untying herself from her homeland provided her with an essential sense of freedom.
"It drew something new out of me," she says. "In Asia, there are fixed notions about women and artists. It's the worst combination: woman, unmarried, artist. I went through quite a difficult time. I found it very difficult to accept it as other people accept it. I felt I have to go abroad to pursue my dream. That's probably what I was thinking since I was little."
Now, the little girl who saw only dead people in well-stocked galleries sees only transformation and life in empty ones; places where awestruck visitors have been known to dance or lie down on the floor, free to respond as they wish in the newly liberated spaces untied and unleashed by Kwak's imagination.
Sun K. Kwak's Untying Space_CUAG (Euijung McGillis curator) continues at the Carleton University Art Gallery in Ottawa until April 29.