The South Korean young artist Haru.K named one of his series Delicious Landscape and elaborated meanwhile on his multi-layered art practice: showcasing changes of the times through visual symbols, exploring the nature of reality by referring to the Eastern pictorial tradition, as well as pursuing creativity in terms of art. It reminds me of the Chinese artist Li Jin and his Banquet series, which stands as a reaction against the gentility and reservedness typical of traditional literati painting in China and provides the modern world with a brand-new “hedonistic aesthetics”, indulging the viewers in a world of art where they can feast on “whatever delicacies and whatever beauties”. Unlike Li Jin, a “humanist” of ostensible “hedonism”, Haru.K is more introspective, a quality common to a much younger generation. “Bite-and-sup”, or simply put “food”, is generally associated with “quotidian”, and our account in this respect generally runs like a diary, full of details of private life, or just like a “day-book”. Also, Li’s Banquet series represents “the homely, which seems more to apply to ‘my own quotidian life’ than to belong to the general public”. The viewers, by contrast, might be amazed in the first place at the unique “sense of ritual” and “solemnity”, in other words, at the artistic creativity that, in a particularly clear way, “misappropriates” formal elements in Eastern traditional landscape painting to mix with common sense of the general public, and “refers to Western pictorial techniques to feature food and utensils on the basis of contemporary landscape painting”. The metaphorically structured spectacle of “bite-andꠓsup” is designed to resolve the conflict between “tradition” and “modernity” as well as to bridge the gap between “East” and “West”. Meanwhile, Haru.K has transformed his Delicious Landscape into a strategy to “give expression to my own ontological being”, thereby taking the so-called “self ” as a basic unity of the “self ”, both intellectually and physically. Art, accordingly, is given the task of maintaining our day-to-day intellectual equilibrium, whereas food gets elevated to a symbol of our sustenance, both working to show our free will and the meaning of our existence with “bite-and-sup” as the subject matter. Indeed, as Haru.K said, “Delicious Landscape, a combined narrative of food, mountains, rivers, and human life, interprets through art the gamut of human sentiments, arouses metaphorically the viewer’s imagination, and responds to the reality of the individual, life and our society.”

As I shift my focus from these art works to the artist himself, I prefer to replace the title Delicious Landscape with “Bite-and-Sup Landscape”. As a typical South Korean artist of the young generation, Haru.K was increasingly exposed to the cultural transformation in the wake of south Korea’s involvement in globalization after the Seoul Olympics in 1988, and at the same time he grew more introspective with age, keenly aware of the loss of individuality as a result of globalization and the disadvantaged position and confusion the East was in, as well as its rigidity when confronted with the West in the midst of globalization. He thus began to seek opportunities to give vent to his individuality on one hand and to present, on the other hand, the elements of change and development through emphasis on the essence of South Korean art. A review of Haru.K’s art practice can give a fairly clear clue to the evolution of his philosophy as an artist. Paintings in his school years were marked with the dual effort to recognize the self as an individual and to explore the influence from the outside. The Eastern dimension of ink paintings was present to awaken both the individual memory and the collective memory. Then during his residency in Uijae Art Studio that placed him in a context where Eastern culture contrasted greatly with Western culture, he defined the nature of art as giving expression and play to social phenomena and cultural implication. Finally the residency program at Gwangju Museum of Art Yangsandong Art Studio saw him restructure the logic and context of landscape painting, which was to materialized in his Delicious Landscape series in the attempt to reconcile the cultural conflict between the East and the West. After Delicious Landscape series finally came out, he rented a studio in Daein Market of Culture and Arts, thus bringing art closer to the public and further, highlighting the function of painting to reflect and create social value ─ a major breakthrough both in concept and practice. I agree with his observation that his own art practice has a lot in common with the revival movement of Chinese painting under the guidance of the Chinese Government, along with the cultural endeavors in Thailand, India and other Asian countries in the same vein. I also agree with his judgement that despite some slight differences Asian countries are facing more or less the same problems, and with his vision to translate into art what Asia is experiencing as a whole instead of something individual or something particular to South Korea only. In addition to the sustained effort on his part as an individual, such vision will not be realized without crossꠓcultural communication or trust, but this young artist nevertheless gives me a very strong impression with his exploration to bring art closer to the general public, and moreover, his “Bite-and-Sup Landscape”, amid the hubbub of the information-and-interaction-based consumerism, is unfolding the possibilities of contemporary art and its boundary-crossing potential.