At the age of 23, Kwak was hospitalized for nearly three years with tuberculosis while recovering from a major operation to remove part of his lungs. The experience necessarily colored his view of his own body, and led to works like Elimination=Relation, which consists of three photographs -- the first showing Kwak urinating on a rock in the middle of a vacant lot; the second, shot from the same angle, showing the wet ground around the rock; and the third showing the same scene after the dirt has dried. In another work, a video piece titled Self-Portrait '78, Kwak's face passes through a series of contortions as it is pressed against a sheet of glass with such force that the material begins to crack.

Kwak's visage is also central to an ongoing project he began in 1974, in which he combines the bottom half of his face with the upper half of an American president's face (beginning with Ford and continuing through to Obama), and frames the composite figure in a Time magazine cover. The artist's grimace, reflected in a mirror, appears under familiar headlines like "Election Special" and "Person of the Year," dominating the image as a whole and providing a subtle commentary on the current state of world affairs. On a trip to Washington, D.C. in 2000, Kwak also displayed Clinton and Kwak, the work he had made with President Clinton's face, in front of the White House and other notable locations around the U.S. capital.

Despite the serious overtones in much of Kwak's work, there is also a playful side. In 1971 the artist climbed to the top of Mt. Hiei in Kyoto, captured some of the air there in transparent plastic bags, and sent the containers to 26 people. The recipients were asked to release the invisible contents immediately after receiving them and to send back a postcard telling where and when the act had occurred. In Duck and Duck, Kwak wrapped himself in a white sheet and gave a series of performances in parks and other public places with a live duck. Needless to say, this was inspired by the pronunciation of both his surname ("quack") and given name. A large collection of duck figurines and toys he has collected are also used to decorate the exterior of this exhibit.

Kwak Duck-Jun, Smile at Night A (1968), collection of the artist All photographs © Kwak Duck-Jun and provided courtesy of the National Museum of Art, Osaka; unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

After gathering what one can of Kwak's fascinating but relatively undocumented post-1970 output from the photographs and other materials shown in glass cases outside the main exhibit, the viewer moves on to the central attraction, his early paintings. From a distance many of the pictures resemble huge heads or bodies made up of organic forms and brilliant colors that are as pleasing to look at as they must have been to make. The pictures exude a sense of immediacy and creativity not unlike that of outsider art. This is particularly true of a work like Smile at Night A (1968), made up of hundreds of mask-like faces of varying sizes and shapes smashed together in a huge uneven block, with a vertical strip of white partitioning off a smaller section of faces on the left, and a similar, slightly wider border on the right. Though it is not obvious in a photograph, the images are applied to a thick layer of plaster and gofun (a white pigment used in classical Japanese painting) to create an undulating surface, with some parts of the picture rising up into small hills of paint and others sinking down into shallow valleys.

It is interesting to compare these early, purely imaginative expressions with Kwak's later, largely conceptual efforts, especially since there seems to be almost nothing tying the two approaches together and no sign of anything similar to his paintings in the rest of the artist's body of work. More than anything, though, the viewer wonders how much Kwak's Korean background has informed his work, and further, how a greater tolerance of ethnic diversity might have changed Japanese art history.

Kwak Duck Jun: The Paintings of the 1960s The National Museum of Art, Osaka 1 February - 11 May 2014

	Christopher Stephens Christopher Stephens has lived in the Kansai region for over 25 years. In addition to appearing in numerous catalogues for museums and art events throughout Japan, his translations on art and architecture have accompanied exhibitions in Spain, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Belgium, South Korea, and the U.S. His recent published work includes From Postwar to Postmodern: Art in Japan 1945-1989: Primary Documents (MoMA Primary Documents, 2012) and Gutai: Splendid Playground (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2013).