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21c AGP The Fourth Activity
ArtMessenger - The experiences and the communications of art in cyberspaces
Visual music Jung Bong Won
Ho Seong Kang¡¯s Promenade, Windy mysterious world
Sounds are caught in the backgrounds like the wind net. Ho Seong Kang constructs images in traditional paintings drawn on silk. A little boy in his pictures resembles himself so that the illusion and the reality seem to be indistinguishable when he stands by his work. It might be because he gets topics when he takes a walk. The spirits he met when he hangs around his studio are transmitted into the pictures. Therefore, his works are both illusionary and realistic and the artist projects himself into a little boy in the pictures who pictures the mysterious world beyond our senses. The interface to the world is the sound. The sounds of children¡¯s laughing, flowers¡¯ blooming, a giraffe¡¯s watching, the tenderness, a peacock¡¯s tail spreading, leaves¡¯ falling, petals¡¯ flying, the moon setting and my mind¡¯s telling are there and all these sounds tickle our soul and are played all together in a melody which is the sprit ringing our sympathy. Before the Promenade series, Emyoudongja (a little minstrel) was his main theme. His work's motives come from Korean traditional painting, Sinsundo( a picture of the transcendent being in Taoism). The little minstrel plays the mysterious world¡¯s sounds sitting on the light and transparent silk. Ho Seong Kang¡¯s fantasy is fresh and radiant like just cleaned laundries. It seems to be that he dreams in order to filter the heaven¡¯s sound by opening the daily life¡¯s chink.
The dexterity in fine brushing and the understanding of the material are remarkable in Ho Seong Kang¡¯s Promenade series. Even though he uses the traditional tools and colors, the content itself and the arrangements of it are over both eastern and western cultures. Coloring the back side of the picture gives the profundity to the objects and using the transparent silk gives the clarity. The arrangement and the motif of the stories are western (this is not absolute. there are lots of oriental motives) and the effects are graphical. Based on the traditional paint¡¯s genealogy, Ho Seong Kang is on the side of the color drawing not on the side of the black and white drawing and he is on the Bukhwa tradition(the old Chinese paintings developed in the Chinese Northern School) skilled in the fine brushing. However, his works can not be explained simply in the sense of the genealogy or modernized traditional painting. Instead, his works can be described in terms of the oriental painting comprehending the new sensitivity of our ages or the contemporaneousness of Korean painting. First, his paining skill is excellent and the modernity of digital and fantastic sensitivity is naturally imposed on his paintings.
However, his indicative and expository expression!! is problematic, which he should resolve by himself. It is unpredictable whether his world would be an empty space sounding silent songs or an extremely real world sounding water fall like noises, for he is twenties yet, but it is needless that he is worry about the vacant spaces of a canvas beforehand. Considering the art history which have had the sympathy with coeval!!s and naturally established new painting styles, his wish would be satisfied when he would confront his emotions with thorough devotion and then the material usage and the style would be enhanced. That is our wish, too.
InSook Nan (Aesthetics, Art Criticism), translated by Yeonjung Kim
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