Landscape Images

2019 Young Artist Invitation Exhibition

GMA Ha Jung-woong Museum of Art

By An So-yeon, Art Critic

Haru. K’s exhibition titled Pungent-Tasting Jjamppong, Weird Gourmet is filled with many images overflowing the venue. Coined through a combination of the Chinese characters “嘩” (meaning “change”) and “兟” (meaning “move forward”), its Korean title “와신” (譁兟) seems to have been suggested by the artist himself to encompass every meaning of his oeuvre. He allows anyone to make assumptions about the existence of diversity in terms of form and content through a juxtaposition of the bare word “짬뽕” (jjamppong) and “와신”. This unidentified word brings to mind a paratactic fusion of words and a mix of arbitrary images deriving from this attitude in lieu of their meanings. That is, they put emphasis on the revelation of an exposed way of combination called “mixing”.

Haru. K initially majored in Oriental painting. He has addressed ordinary scenes in his surroundings such as common citiscapes as the subject matter of his work. Given his use of “landscape” from traditional painting for the title of his pieces, at some point he seems to have shared his interest with the many artists who have reinterpreted traditional landscape painting in a modern fashion. He explored the form of traditional painting in his series such as Delicious Landscape, Edited Landscape, and Real-View Landscape and made forays into forging his own distinctive modeling idioms based on his references to them. This exhibition is an extension of these attempts. He seems to be in the process of changing (嘩) the context of traditional landscapes and moving forward (兟) to the next phase.

As I examine his work up close and personal, I wonder why he concentrates on the word “landscape”. For what does he attempt a referential change (嘩) concerning traditional painting and with what sort of re-understanding does he want to move forward (兟)? I have my doubts about the true nature and context of his practices. In fact, there are no elements of what can be called landscape painting in Rainbow Moodeung Mountain (2019). The word “landscape” has been constantly used in his titles but aspects of it have disappeared and cardinal factors of traditional painting such as paper, brush, and ink are not used. In addition, he does not refer to or appropriate traditional painting’s conventional technique.

What are the factors of traditional painting that are still valid in Rainbow Moodeung Mountain that was produced using a large canvas and oil paint? Haru. K said that he tried to observe and approach the subject matter of Moodeung Mountain which had been addressed from the standpoint of contemporary society and political history from a dimension of new value. He seems to arrive at a utopia in his imagination when he transfers this sumptuous, splendidly shining mountain to his canvas and faces it. In terms of the spirituality of traditional landscape painting that contemplated becoming one with nature, he tried to envisage a utopia that stays aloof from the reality of Moodeung Mountain.

Edited Landscapes (2019) features a spectacular landscape image from another dimension through a macroscopic view of an abridged natural scene that is similar to a bird’s-eye view. It was done in consideration of Rainbow Moodeung Mountain in which an unrealistic, rainbow-colored mountain appears very abstract on an enormous canvas. It is for this reason that Edited Landscape remains visually at a distance but is particularly characterized by a vivid juxtaposition of these ambiguous visual experiences while entering a territory that goes beyond pictorial space. This reminds us of our familiar experience in which we noticed microscopic aspects of the real world in natural scenery found in ancient landscape paintings. His installation titled Edited Landscape is a concretization of such ambivalent visual experiences.

His scroll painting seems to feature a vast landscape, but the longer we look at it the more we come to experience a sort of distortion in our perception that makes it feel much smaller, like a potted landscape. Thus, the world pictured in the scroll can resemble either a vast landscape, a reduced or potted landscape, or a representation of one. Each has a subtle distinction: they are completely different in terms of point of view. The macroscopic point of view toward a landscape causes a physical experience in which one relatively perceives the sizes of objects and oneself from a microscopic point of view. The three-dimensional scene overlapped with a vertical scroll landscape doubles that sensation. Haru. K has created a landscape that seems to be seen from a bird’s-eye view through a mixture of small stones gleaned from Moodeung Mountain and a reduced mountain printed with a 3D printer. This type of work demonstrates every aspect of an “edited landscape” through a mix of the real and the fake, the two-dimensional and the three-dimensional, and landscapes and events.

At this time, the artist has access to deep in a landscape, facing each event, counterfeit natural objects’ poor quality, and unexpectedly flat fake three dimensional objects. With reference to the conversion of landscape painting’s extreme viewpoint and editorial composition he seems to move on to his exploration of form and media to maximize such effects. Autoreverse (Escape from the Everyday)(2019) is a video made of three dimensional images found in Edited Landscape. In other words, he searches for a route to enter this “reduced vast landscape” through the camera, referring to the conversion of the viewer’s viewpoint. And he demonstrates the surroundings forming our lives and the movements adjusted in them through an overlap of lives in a modern city within the simulated landscape.

Let us review his landscape series beginning with Delicious Landscape (2013), his early work, and move on to Edited Landscape (2019). Haru. K collected images of natural scenes by sketching and photographing them and then reconstructed them and other situations he has experienced based on his memories. At the same time, he prepared a basis for his accounts which he likens to the process of potting plants or gleaning viewing stones. He focused primarily on the juxtaposition of potted or reduced scenes by referring to the gestures pertaining to such hobbies. In addition, he arranged images whose ornamental effects were maximized by “editing” the landscapes he has experienced and sketched in a way that is reminiscent of a lunch box made up of local specialties. He disapproves of Oriental painting’s typicality, but this is perhaps related to his skepticism about our perception of its form, not the actual form itself. Given his own playful attitude, he probably feels inconvenienced by the need to maintain something formal in traditional painting and the perceptual strictness by which the liberal imagination cannot be set free, trapped in pictures.

He concentrated on composing Painting in Painting (2019) in such a way that allowed him to be free from such rigidity. He explores conditions in which nature, landscapes, and any scene of life can become pictures. As a result, his landscape series could not stay within the bounds of Oriental painting’s materials and techniques. He has focused more on interpreting the aesthetic experiences, thoughts, and amusements that move from the outside to the inside of a painting in landscape images.