Chanmo KANG

Familiar with Western art, which he studied at university, Kang Chan Mo was also enamoured with Western philosophy. He explored the complex paths of the relationship between form and line, colour and space, but, in a way, something was missing in this approach. But it is difficult to say what is missing before having found or encountered what precisely cancels this lack.

Western thought makes lack something whose grasp or possession would confer on life a finally stable unity. It is different in Eastern thought, in particular when it refers to Buddhism. Lack is not associated with something that one should try to grasp, to possess, but with a way of seeing the world and of experiencing the relationship between oneself and the universe.

Art in the West in the 20th century is linked to the thought deployed by phenomenology. The work is then thought of in terms of this horizon of consciousness on which things and the world appear. This horizon is the field of an essential experience, that of the encounter between the Self and the World. It happens that this encounter gives rise to ecstatic moments that make those who live them say that it is a fusion between the self and the world.

The multiple experiences made by artists, writers and poets, linked among others to Buddhism in the sixties, in the USA, Great Britain and France in particular, such as the artists of the "Beat Generation" of certain currents of the emerging pop culture and poets like Henri Michaux, have brought to Western artistic practice, oriental elements.

But, it is finally in the East itself, following the opening of the East towards the West which followed the end of the Second World War, that a renewal of oriental thought occurred in the field of artistic practices and painting in particular. Kang Chan Mo is a striking example of this profound movement which runs through art, in Korea in particular and of the richness which it carries.