이상과 고흐

Yi Sang and Van Gogh

Yi Sang served in the Japanese government-general of Korea for four years(1929.3-1933.3). This period is when events that had the greatest impact on his life took place: the death of his uncle and the onset of tuberculosis. During this time, he was suffering from the problems of dealing with the ‘family reality,’ expressed by his uncle’s tyranny, and the ‘nationalistic reality’ represented by the uniforms of the Japanese government-general of Korea. In this situation, his resignation from the technologist of the office was a product of his own willingness to overcome the two ‘realities’ in his own way, taking advantage of his uncle s sudden death. I wanted to think about how the artist in the so-called ‘cultural periphery’ could pursue contemporaryity and universality, focusing on the relationship between Yi Sang and Van Gogh. This period of Yi Sang’s life is, to me, being re-emerged as a time when he was becoming aware of Gogh. “December 12”(1930) is a work that reveals the inner landscape of Yi Sang during the period. It focuses on the pain that family reality brings. The illustrations in “December 12” depict his feelings of Yi Sang, who is suffering because of his family s reality. He must have found himself in Van Gogh painting a woman obsessed with despair. This is why “December 12” portrays sadness, despair, and solitude caused by things like ambivalence, misunderstanding, and discord among the characters rather than the narrative itself. Just as Van Gogh painted many self-portraits as a self-exploration, Lee Sang-sang also painted his self-portrait and translated his self-portrait into a literary work. Some of the efforts of this self-discovery turned out to be ‘December 12’ and are well represented by a poetic self-portrait called ‘mirror poetry’. As Van Gogh wrote in his letter, mirrors are used to draw self-portraits. Lee Sang’s “mirror poetry” is a byproduct of his experience of painting self-portraits, hoping to become a painter. And it is meaningful in that it reflects not only his inner self but also his social situation. Both Yi Sang and Van Gogh had a broad and deep understanding of the traditions of literature and art. They were avant-garde artists who pushed the principle of subjectivity to the extreme based on this understanding. They were all from the periphery of culture, faced with the cultural and artistic situation of Chaos, who overcame this reality and created their own art.