THIS DOUBLE exhibition is an unusual event - paintings by a respected South Koreanborn artist, raised a Buddhist but converting to Roman Catholicism in his twenties, and eventually becoming a Dominican priest. Apparently he has been painting since his teens (he was born in 1940) and is now Paris based.
The paintings in the Hugh Lane Gallery tend to be spacious, airy canvases, while those in the Taylor Galleries are smaller and include numerous watercolours. Some of the latter are painted on halfmoon or fan shaped papers, and these have a frankly decorative, almost brittle charm. Big or small, however, the idiom is pretty much the same: floating shapes, a luminous white ground with clouds or ribbons and sometimes explosions of colour.
The Orientalism is obvious, but this is recognisably "international" painting, an eclectic mixture of East and West. So much so, in fact, that initially I had a sense of time travelling. The floating or trailing abstract forms, the almost liquid glow of the colour, sometimes superimposed like watercolour washes, and above all the spacious white "grounds" all of this recalls Sam Francis and certain other painters of roughly a generation ago. Tachism, "staining" and similar effects abounded then, practised by a variety of painters who included Morris Louis, Helen Frankenthaler and who remembers him now? - Paul Jenkins.
To an extent, this was a variant of Abstract Expressionism, and certainly Kim en Joong could be brought under that spacious umbrella. The big difference, however, is that while most of the artists mentioned were deeply influenced by Oriental art (ultra fashionable in those days), Kim en Joong is a bonafide Oriental.
The legacy of Eastern calligraphy is implicit in his brushstrokes and so is the specifically Oriental feeling tot nature - using that term in the broadest and even quasimystical sense. There is an aura of joy and inner radiance in his pictures. making it fully understandable why be professes a love of Fra Angelico's frescoes.
He also understands how to create a sensation of height, depth and distance in an almost disembodied way, without resorting to tricks of perspective or an illusionistic type of space. As with Sam Francis at his best, his pictures do truly "float", and in an almost celestial sense. That he sometimes sinks into decoration - admittedly, ultra tasteful and subtle decoration - is perhaps an in built risk in this kind of art.
In particular, the very large canvas which occupies an end wall in the Hugh Lane Gallery (the pictures, by the way, do not have numbers or titles) has an almost elemental, quality of aerial and spiritual soaring.