bricked out

Halfway through teaching the Korean student (let's call her Shimmer), she gets a call from her mum who called to make sure I didn't leave before she got back. I was momentarily overwhelmed by ominous foreboding but being pretty much clueless about what that was about I dismissed it and resumed the business of rearranging Shimmer's bowhold.

Then the door opened and Shimmer's mum edged in, holding on to a painting that was one and a half times as tall as her, hovering at the door way wondering how to move the picture in. (Shimmer's mum is an art curator, so buying paintings that cost tens of thousands of dollars is apparently a regular business). I was expecting something earth shattering like the punk rock piece or the football-size crumpled chewing gum wrappers sculpture made of fibreglass. Instead it was a pretty non-descript one-colour-different-tones piece of sand-covered wood, shaded to form 3 dimensional bricks. Something like the one below.



Non-descript at first sight, but upclose and personal, it is breathtaking because of the way the shadows are painted. The artist, Kim Kang Yong, apparently collects sand, spreads it across the canvas, then shades in the shadows from left to right, without first drawing a sketch. And it's so geometrical and dimensional at this point my vocabulary breaks down because I don't know how to describe art, I only understand the feeling of being captivated, of seeing different perspectives from different angles, so I was flitting around it, sitting down, looking at it from above, seeing it from the sides, because at each spot a different shadow popped up, and you saw a different space, a different brick, and a different feeling behind bricks at different positions.

I can't believe I'm waxing lyrical about sand on wood.

And Shimmer's mum was obviously excited about it - that was why she called back: to make sure I was around to witness the art piece stripped of its plastic covering in its full glory, and then she said it cost US$25 000 I almost died. The cleaner was around to witness the unveiling, said she didn't dare to clean around it, and then tentatively fingered the sand.

Shimmer, on the other hand, wasn't that impressed. Maybe it's the jadedness that comes with having tons of art pieces strewn around the house, maybe she's only 13 and probably had other interests like TV, or maybe she was PMS-ing (but not in a bad way she said she was just tired). In a way I could understand the mopeyness - her mum said "We have to sell the TV, let's not eat today, let's sell everything in the house except the piano and cello and art".

Is that what you call living and breathing art? It was totally surreal seeing her rant on like that because I had this impression of Koreans being eminently practical people. Apparently not.

But I got my aesthetic fix and am no longer visually starved. Yay. (Oh my goodness I sound freaking deprived. Blame it on exams.)