Dawn, the Copious Vacancy The day is time for labor. The night is time for rest. Then what about dawn? Dawn is the time for thinking. Dawn calls our soul first before it awakes our body. Before the beginning of the hurly-burly of the world, it reveals the essence of the world. At dawn the spirit and the essence meet like that. The one who loves the dawn therefore is the one loves the truth. He is the one who seeks after the true way of life. Dawn loves also that kind of person dearly. Kang Seung-hee feels and draws the very kind of dawn. Among all dawns, Kang Seung-hee’s subject was the dawn of the city. The reason he was attracted by the dawn of the city is that he liked the traces of man. Energy of man, waking up even the dawn, attracted him. His growth ring however was added even to the point of yearning the touch of the nature surpassing that humanism. Energy of man which wakes up the dawn is good, but no power is more desirable and lovable than that of dawn which wakes up the man. Dawn is coming even the neck of the rooster is twisted, and even the clock is broken and thrown into the dustbin. Good thing about dawn is that there is new beginning and there is leeway in time to feel and be grateful about that. Kang Seung-hee thus stepped from the heart of the city to the Hangang. He walked all along the river, listening to all the whisper of the dawn, from the upper Hangang to the lower of it. He did a legwork of thought. Flowing along the Hangang, he once again felt keenly how elegant is the light of dawn, and how fragrantis the smell of it. That was delicately expressed in the subtle variation of tones. The reason, his print shows exceptional variety of tones for an aquatint etching print, where tones can only be varied by the degree of acid corrosion of copper plate, is highly indebted to his persistent and concentrated research and development of etching technique for long years. is a very lyrical piece in which an empty boat floating lonely in the middle of the river. Looking at the magnanimity of the lonely and empty boat, it dawned upon me that the thought of the dawn is a kind of copiousness which can be gotten by the degree of vacancy one can afford to get. Anyone, therefore, who wants to wakes up at dawn, must vacate himself like that. Anyone who vacates himself must get up at dawn, must love the dawn, to be copiously vacated. Only an empty boat at dawn can pull up the anchor of new starting in the dream of real abundance.
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