By Louis Wittig Photo by Heuichul Kim
The subway station at 42nd Street and Eighth Avenue in Manhattan is a four-block-long concrete artery. Tens of thousands of people push through the beeping turnstiles every morning. Hedge fund executives elbow their way through crowds of weary commuters from New Jersey, who brush past dazed tourist families trying to find their way to Times Square. An impatient human murmur and the heavy rumble of trains below echo off the walls.
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Tucked in a far corner is a small, rhomboid storefront. Below small track lamps lining the top of the glass enclosure walls hang oil-paint portraits: of a young, short-haired woman with an uncertain smile; of Albert Einstein, looming with large brown eyes; of a newlywed couple, glowing. The stenciling on the door reads: “Sung Portrait Painting.”
Ki Yong Sung, 73, with thin black hair protruding from under a dark baseball cap, arrives around 8:30 in the morning. It’s a few weeks before Christmas, and business is brisk. He puts on a smock and places a CD in the player. Mozart. It helps him relax and dulls the noise of the trains. He sits down on a low stool in front of his easel. He begins to paint. The easel is positioned so that the canvas faces out, toward the window and the concourse beyond. Anyone who passes by can peek over Sung’s shoulder and see what he’s working on.
Slowly, in ones and twos, people break off from the moving crowd, wander over to the store and linger.
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“It is an odd place for a studio,” Sung agrees, with a chuckle.
I’m sitting on the stool next to him. He’s turned from the portrait of a blushing, middle-aged Hispanic couple he was working on to talk to me.
Sung, who seems to laugh after every other sentence, has been painting under 42nd Street since he lost the lease on another storefront downtown. The few other stores that line the long gray hall sell cheap T-shirts and Spanish-language newspapers. He picked the location because the price was right, and with the inherent traffic, he never has to advertise. I ask him how he got started painting portraits. From across the small room, his niece Sue Jong Lee, who helps him run the shop, answers.
“He was born talented,” she says. Sung nods.
Born and raised in Seoul, he loved to doodle ever since primary school. He was in his second year of art college in 1950 when the Korean War broke out and ended his education. To support his widowed mother and sister, Sung visited American military bases and solicited jobs. The GIs gave him snapshots of girlfriends and parents back home, and Sung painted them.
Devastating wars are not generally remembered this way, but Sung has a fond expression on his face as he speaks. All the Americans knew him. He could go to any base, and they’d wave him in. The soldiers paid him in coupons that allowed him to buy cheap cartons of Lucky Strikes from the base store — cartons he sold on the black market for a 1,000-percent profit. It was the most money he’d made in his life.
Sung still paints the same way. Clients bring him photos — painting live models takes too long — and he makes art. He sketches the subjects in pencil as clearly as he can. Blurry photos are the hardest part of his job. He paints in the skin tone of the face first. The eyes are the most important, though. He has to get those just right.
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This is partly what attracts the bystanders: there’s a mystery in watching as a human face appears on a blank canvas, one stroke of color at a time, knowing that it’s moving directly from the artist’s imagination to reality. On the street above Sung’s shop there’s a drug store with a photo lab. No one loiters there, watching the pictures develop.
Someone has crept up against the glass wall and is staring over Sung’s shoulder as we talk. It’s unnerving, but Sung doesn’t mind. Occasionally, some will stand and watch for hours.
I ask Sung whether he thinks, if the Korean War hadn’t happened, he might have become a famous artist.
“I think so,” interjects Lee. Sung smiles demurely.
“Maybe,” he says.
Later, he tells me he probably would not have been a famous artist. His technique is good. He can copy anything. “But I’m not creative,” he shrugs.
He can’t think of any one painting he’s most proud of. He did a self-portrait once, and hung it up on the shop wall. But someone offered to buy it, so he sold it. The portraits he’s most happy with are triumphs of effort more than skill. Once a client wanted a portrait of a loved one, but the only photo of that loved one’s face was ripped and the eyes were missing. Sung painstakingly imagined the missing features and gave his client a painting with a complete face. He has done the same with photos scorched in fires and waterlogged by Hurricane Katrina.
“I look at the customer and if they’re happy, I’m happy, too,” he says.
I ask Sung what he would might have done with his life, if he hadn’t been an artist.
“Nothing else,” he says. “I love painting.”
***
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It’s mid-morning. Sung is painting. Outside, in the concourse, Dante, an education professor on his way to the Port Authority Bus Terminal, does a double take as he walks past the store.
“[This place] sticks out in a good way,” he says, eyeing a portrait of a reposeful Malcolm X hanging on Sung’s back wall that would look nice in his office. “If it had been on a street with a bunch of other painting shops, I probably wouldn’t have noticed it.” He’s thinking about buying it, but he doesn’t have the time to think for too long. The bus his daughter is on is arriving in a few minutes.
The portrait of the middle-aged Hispanic couple is still on the easel in front of Sung. In the black-and-white photo Sung works from, the couple is leaning against an old car, dressed in street clothes. In the richly colored painting, Sung has changed the scene: it’s their wedding day. She’s in a white dress. He is in a tuxedo.
Anyone today can point and click a picture with a digital camera, Sung says. But paintings allow his clients to remember the people in them just as they want. Many of his clients say they want to look skinnier and happier in their portraits, so that’s how he paints them. Most of these paintings are of clients’ loved ones: parents, children, wives, husbands, some pets. Painted, they have a dignity and importance that the instant nature of photos don’t always convey.
Sung can’t guess how many faces he’s painted. After the Korean War, Sung followed the U.S. Army to Vietnam, painting in officers’ clubs. He gets up and retrieves his old military ID from a desk. It’s framed. He painted at U.S. air bases in Thailand and the Middle East. He painted portraits of U.S. generals and the Saudi royal family. At his fastest, he could finish two portraits a day.
When he returned to Korea in the late ‘70s, he was a rich man. He invested, dabbled in real estate and collected Korean art. Then, the 1997 Asian financial crisis hit the country.
“I lost all my money,” Sung says matter-of-factly. “I didn’t have any experience. I didn’t really know what I was doing. So I lost all my money, all my buildings.”
Already in his 60s, he arrived in New York in 1998 with only his oil paint box and easel. He has been painting in small stores between the Financial District and Midtown ever since. His two children are grown and married: his son in California, his daughter in Korea. Before he leaves for work each morning, his wife will lament the lost money. Sung won’t say anything as he slips out. So long as he has his health, he has no plans to retire.
***
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Sung will leave the shop before 7 p.m. and take the 30-minute bus ride back to his apartment in Palisades Park, New Jersey. When he gets home, he’ll continue to paint portraits. He might listen to the radio while he does it, but painting is all he really does. These days he finishes about four a week.
The portraits hanging in Sung’s window aren’t high art, but it’s almost impossible not to notice them. Created expertly, without any ambition except to please, they give an absorbing depth and dignity to the faces they represent: average faces just like those flowing through the subway concourse, but remarkable when suspended on canvas.
Outside, the constant light and noise of Manhattan hang silent and still. Late into the night, New Yorkers, trained by city life to filter out all distraction, will still slow as they pass Sung’s store, and pause to take long glances.
