“Useful Pictures and Useful Arts”

Yun Ik (Chief of Curatorial Division 1, Gwangju Museum of Art)

What is a picture? What is art? These questions are premised on how anyone can draw or paint an image, but creating art is reserved for a specific type of person. Generally, pictures represent a liked and enjoyed, interesting activity, like how they are a very interesting kind of pastime for children. Art class in a person's childhood are of course a happy time, and children freely draw and color different kinds of objects. However, as time passes, we gradually lose time for, as well as the joy of, drawing pictures. Once an adult, unless one is an artist by vocation, or one of the few art enthusiasts who paint as a hobby, drawing or painting pictures will have become quite a strange endeavor at some point for most.

At the close of another year, countless art students enter the real world with the nervous hopes of becoming an artist after some kind of a practical training phase as they leave their respective academic training grounds. Like the apothegm, "well begun is half done," the early years of a young artist's career generally determine the artist's unique artistic identities with which he or she is to navigate the art world for the rest of his or her life. Haru, who was selected a "Light 2015" exhibiting artist, states, "My mission as an artist is to acquire a level of improvement in the process of art's development from traditional modes to contemporary ones." Meanwhile, Haru's general wish simply as an individual is to live as an honest and active member of society. The artist candidly claims his greatest ambition is the vitally cultural communication of the value of his artistic labor, in addition to securing basic means for life.

Since he first entered art as a student, Haru strove to paint paintings incorporating our times. The artist apostrophizes of how he pursued epochal change for traditional Korean painting through his unique works on awakened and consistent themes, from his previous realist paintings expressing political messages to his innovative formal experimentation for shedding the inconsistencies of existing Korean painting. Haru's such thoughts and practice ultimately require us to ask ourselves various ironic questions, such as why paintings of the past had solely addressed stories of a great, heavy, deep and high space far, far away, when examining his work. Haru has attempted to paint "useful pictures" no matter the circumstance. What is this useful picture Haru so agonizes over? What justification do such paintings possess as artworks acquiring the essence categorical of art? These questions themselves apply to all of today's young artists.

Traditionally, the aim of Korean painting has been in depth-seeking spirituality rather than dynamic external developments and expansion, in its subject matter and forms. For this reason, the significance of Korean painting has been in spiritual reflection through one's conversation with his or her self for spiritual discipline, rather than in formal expression regarding one's self and the world. In such a situation, Haru's attempt to play a social role as an artist by socially communicating in his own artistic language through realist subject matter generally unaddressed in traditional Korean painting appears to be fulfilling a moral obligation. Delicious Landscapes, painted since 2012, endowed Haru K. with a recognition of a new horizon when the artist was occupied with the individual's mind and body, Asian painting's modern perspectives, and the union of daily life and the arts. In beautiful landscapes filling Haru's canvases, all kinds of foods and various fruits and culinary ingredients are, as if singing and dancing, surrounded by clouds while forming our magnificent mountains and plains. Haru K.'s paintings, which are a pure pleasure to look at, present viewers with unique experiences of the five senses by conjuring up our memories of various scents and flavors.

Representing Gwangju, the flavorful and stylish city of the arts, with more realistic subject matter, Haru K.'s painting, Delicious Landscape: Mudeung Journey began from the artist's intention to paint his city in his own visual language. A means to most persuasively demonstrate to others a simulacrum of Gwangju, a city Haru is empirically familiar with, this is also in recognition of the historic fact that, in premodern times, royal court painters often painted landscapes of places monarchs were unable to visit in person. This painting is of a very dramatically analog method in today's digital world, and it perfectly communicates to viewers the artist's intentions to improve Korean painting in his own ways by alternatively reinterpreting historic paintings, as a dignified harmony between reality and ideals, shared by traditional landscape painting, is felt in it. Haru K. writes of his experience of meditating on, understanding and growing to like even more such works through his work.

The simplest story of how one feeds him or herself is perhaps an exceedingly truthful and real theme. Meanwhile, the artist's parents' faces full of hopes to this day about their son, his beloved wife and the pure eyes of the artist's newborn are projected in such works' contents, representing sincere stories applying to all of us. Seeing how he truthfully lives our ceaselessly changing and self-regenerating world each haru (day) through his unique works and life for "useful pictures and useful arts" as such, I heartily applaud and anticipate the young artist, Haru K.'s future.