Kim Jung Gi tribute: Malayalam filmmaker Krishand remembers the Korean comic book artist this inktober

Kim Jung Gi (Illustration by Krishand RK)

It has become quite an arduous task to stick to a routine and sketch every day this Inktober (the global challenge to do an ink drawing every day for the 31 days of October). And this time, I am doing it on an iPad with my Procreate graphics editor unlike every other time in the past 10 years, when consistently I have failed to make it for all of the days of the month, but still I would do it on paper using Indian ink.

As a child who could draw, I could not harbour any hopes of a formal training. My parents decided against sending me to a drawing school because, apparently, my father thought at the time that it would kill the innate artistic intent in me. And, so, I always lacked technique. The anatomy of what I tried to create wouldn’t work, the weight would fall apart, the medium would behave the way it wanted to rather than let me be in control.

In 2011, I was introduced to the world of Feng Zhu, the veteran American concept artist. This was also the time when social media was coming into its own, we were slowly discovering Facebook and moving away from Orkut. And when Deviantart.com (world’s largest online art gallery and community) was very popular. And all of a sudden, the likes of me started discovering a number of interesting artists. I became a member of a few communities and would take up weekly tasks.

On one such forum, I came across an artist named Kim Jung Gi. This was in 2009. And Kim would draw with brush pens. I was from an engineering background, not an art school, so I had never heard of or known a brush pen. Furthermore, I found it really hard to find them in my small city of Thiruvananthapuram. Kim’s art struck me big time. He was drawing from his memory and filling the environment with figures, poses, concept art, manga and what not. And that too with perspectives of wide-angle lenses, such as a 12mm lens. And here I was, someone uninitiated when it came to lenses, but I had seen the film Enter the Void (2009), Gaspar Noé’s psychological drama fantasy, and I had an idea that what Kim was making was not easy.

Kim Jung Gi at work on stage, a performance artist (Photo: Twitter)

This was also the point in my life when I badly wanted to be a comic book artist and was devising methods to make graphic novels. I opened my eyes to the wonderful world of Neil Gaiman, Frank Miller, and around this time, illustrator Jim Lee introduced a new series of batman in Batman: Hush (2002-03). I was, however, more attracted towards the illustrations by Scott Robertson and Dan Milligan, but it were the sketches of Kim that kept disturbing me. His craft, to be able to sketch from memory, is pure genius. If you take one look at his videos, it wouldn’t be hard to figure out that this man is one of his kind. I understood that I could never sketch like Kim. However, when I first laid my hands on Tiger the Long Tail (2008-10), a comic illustrated by him, in 2011, I had evolved further away from realism and was totally coming to terms with my sketches.

I wanted to create massive complicated works like Kim. These are not doodles. I always wondered if he starts off with a plan or if it all plays out well. The sense of design inspired me and was one of the greatest impetus that led me to a design college.

Kim Jung Gi, from then on, had become a part of my life. I have copied his images. A zillion times. Secretly, of course. The illustrations of Phani Tetali, my faculty head at IDC School of Design, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, reminded me of Kim, and only last week — before the shocking news of Kim’s passing came — we had a conversation about how much Kim had inspired all of us. The long videos of him sketching on walls (Kim holds the Guinness World Record for the “longest drawing by an individual”) and the intricate details that he brings out, makes us want to go that extra mile.

While working on my first film Aavasavyuham: The Arbit Documentation of an Amphibian Hunt (a superhero mockumentary drama, which won the 2022 Kerala State Film Awards for the best film and screenplay), I had to sketch quite a bit. I always think of images and can’t do content without having scribbles, mood boards, storyboards, characters. I have to draw it out. Aavasavyuham had all complicated scenes scribbled out and then arranged as animatics mostly. Sometimes, it worked so well in our favour and helped in the production. I think sketching something gives me a better understanding of the visual anatomy of the mise-en-scène.

For his Malayalam indie film 'Aavasavyuham' (2022), on environmental issues in Kochi’s Puthuvype island with a superhero amphibian man, Krishand sketched extensively and made storyboards out of them (Images courtesy Krishand RK)

So, there were panels and storyboard that really required me to draw over and over again, since, unlike Kim, some of us are not so skilled to draw things right out of our heads. We have to juxtapose references and add personal data to get the final image. The image is never what we wanted but it’s close and it’s workable. I didn’t make an organised storyboard for some scenes. It was rather like Kim’s explorations. Random but with intent.

Kim’s death, at age 47, has stunned us all. It was just about last week when I had ordered one of his illustrated collections, Sketchbook 2011. As I sit down with today’s topic on Inktober, I wonder what Kim would draw.