THE SHILLA SEOUL

2. Park Young-Nam [Gogh&Mondrian V, VI]

Park Young-Nam uses his fingers as a painting tool. He first pours different colored paint on the canvas and mixes them manually. The acrylic paint he uses starts to dry after about 15 minutes, and hardens after half an hour, at which point his painting gains speed and he moves his fingers more rapidly to paint. Leaving the body to move repeatedly with a natural rhythm brings a very pleasant feeling. Fragments of paints splashed from the fingertips become alternately stagnated, scraped, or washed away. Park Young-Nam once said that the property of paints that doesn’t allow modifying past traces seem similar to his life.

3. Kim Chang-Yeol [Water drop]

It’s like the water drops are on the paper are real, inexplicably enchanting the viewers at first sight. For Kim Chang-Yeol, water drops stand for self-purification. He suffered during the Korean War at age 20, and the drops purify those terrible scars of from that time. The drops also stand for agony of modern humans – the water drops filling the screen represent the desire to escape from reality, as well as the people who have to stay within, plus the great transitions in our lives.

4. Choi Jong-Tae [Face]

Sculpting equates to the process of birth, and the mindset of sculpting to give birth to the final piece represents the pursuit of truth. Sharply crafted faces in the midst of simple but daring lines provide equilibrium to the whole work. His works are about faces only, and the minimalistic forms of his work lead to new shapes in the geometric structures. Additionally, those faces, derived from the girl’s statue and especially preferred by the artist himself, contain the push and pull of his love and agony within art.

5. Yu Ui-Rang [Flowers and Trees]

His “Moonlight” calms the surroundings with delicate descriptions of mundane subjects. Bright colors, decorative patterns and meticulous movements of the brush all work together to closely unite minute and delicate factors to create a rich story. His preferred subjects include the offerings of our daily lives, such as tables, fruit, baskets, hats, curtains, glass jars, purses, etc. Our life has a future and hope because of how much we value such mundane objects. In this regard, His works are beautiful.

6. Hyun Hye-Sung [Sea Story]

Nature is breathing in his works. Despite the coldness of marble, his sculptures somehow delivery warm temperatures like the human body. It can be said that his works reflect the hope and frustration from his studies abroad, as well as his own strength that grows with each critical situation. The softness and hardness of marble are both maximized while the artist’s sensibility stays in harmony, creating a unison of sharpness and tenderness.

7. Kim Dong-Woo [Performing lover]

Standing as one with a cello, which is known to have the closest sound to that of humans, this statue of a woman delivers the warmth of her heart. Built with white marble from Italy, this work boasts its great finish with a combination of the soft curves of the human body and that of the cello. The love that Kim Dong-Woo feels and knows seems to be the most primitive and humane. The muscular arms and huge hands in his works serve as the shield that protects his kind of love. A story of a human will never lose its draw.

8. Arman [Bayadere (Dancer)]

This masterpiece of Armand Pierre Fernandez in 1984 well represents his Orientalism. He is one of the most popular artists in Nouvo Realism in France, and creates works by stacking up plastic or resin-based consumable products that are manufactured and consumed on a daily basis, and cutting and burning them. He became fascinated with musical instruments like the piano, violin, saxophone, etc., which also served as materials for his art, because he believed that such works were the best rendition of his internal voices.

9. Salvador Dali [Space Venus]

The genius is well known for strange behavior that even got him kicked out of the association of surrealism artists, but he managed to view the world of unconsciousness from reality. He expressed the world of dream or fantasy in the subconscious, or “resonance” from the psychoanalytic theory of Sigmund Freud in his pictures. His painting method, that even he referred to as ‘monomaniac and critical’ results from his intention to express strange and unreasonable hallucination with objectivity and realism.

10. Kim Heung-Joo [Untitled]

This artist brings the conflicting factors of familiarity and unfamiliarity simultaneously. With just one flower or even a leaf filling the screen, the flower strays from being a part of that screen, but attempts to coincide with it. Kim says that his work is completed not in the overall structure, but in the numerous and minute details. In addition, the meaning of his work doesn’t lie only within the picture itself, but also should be experienced in the space where it is displayed, its relations to other pictures, and context of the viewer in order to be meaningful.

11. Ahn Byung-Suk [The wind]

Ahn Byung-Suk is an artist using bluish impression that resembles nature. It’s been said that “Nature is the mirror reflecting humans.” We tend to behave in more modest ways and solemnly look back on ourselves, and then find the strength to go back to daily life with a completely purified mind. The artist visualizes the existence of ‘Wind’ with the shape of swaying grass. The work represents the introspection about our existence. He attempts to tell us that, like the wind that moves grass but remains invisible, all operations of consciousness are our reality.

12. Jun Gook-Gwang [Origin of Life]

Reviews about his works say that they logically represent longing for nature, and he manages to express the innate power and spirit of nature. Jun Gook-Gwang decided to take his own life at the regretful age of 46, but lived as an artist who pursued immortal goals through his works like a boy who was after the impossible and the infinite. Inside his works and themes, there are still numerous questions and answers swirling around.

13. Bang Hye-Ja [Light of Cell 1, 2]

The artist intends to feel the space and contain its depth in her works. The painting promotes a feeling of meditation, and the calmly sinking world feels similar to the sea that the artist pursues. The flat surface accidentally created by the excessive crumpling of paper, along with the composition that exists yet doesn’t seem to be there, shows the possibility of infinite changes.