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‘The human body like the scenery, the scenery like the human body’

‘The human body like the scenery, the scenery like the human body’

Posted August. 27, 2019 07:30,   

Updated August. 27, 2019 07:30

한국어

Western-style painter Hang Hong-su, 61, living in France, has been holding a solo exhibition titled “Haut-fond” at Youngeun Museum in Gwangju City, Gyeonggi Province since Saturday.

Once you take a step inside, a scenery of deep mountain valleys welcomes you. Each shape of valley-like features with a mysterious look turns out to be overlaps of a human body’s part. They represent the artist’s unique view that describes the human body as a natural scenery – the human body like the scenery, the scenery like the human body.

The 61-year-old Korean artist opened a joint exhibition titled “The Third Reality” to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the UNESCO in Paris in 2005 in collaboration with world-class Chinse sculptor Wang Du. Han’s “Verso of the Origin,” displayed at the UNESCO in 2015, got a lot of attention in the French arts sector by showing his introspection and reflection on the eroticism and divinity of the human body.

Han always takes the same working method to thinly overlay oil painting more than 30 times with a soft brush whether drawing the human body or natural scenes. Overlaps of paining blur the boundaries of shapes, which enables audiences to go wild in their imagination.

“Rather than showing a shape itself on canvas, I lead audiences to move their sensitivities to another world by seeing it,” he said. “My artistic world is full of the yin and yang of the East and the West, eternity and reality, transcendence and secularity.”

“As I keep track of my self-portraits over time and records myself just as watching the sun rising and setting, I can realize that I also change just as nature goes,” Han added.

At the opening party at 2 p.m. on Saturday, visitors can enjoy performance by Marionette depicting human pictures through gestures, musical star Park Hye-mi and cross-over tenor Ryu Ha-na. The exhibition will be held through Sept. 22.


Seung-Hoon Cheon raphy@donga.com