| Realistic Representational Paintings, another everyday life and the hidden avidity_Park So Hee (Professor of Plastic Arts) | |
| “Realistic Representational Paintings, another everyday life and the hidden avidity” Park So Hee (Professor of Plastic Arts) Artist Min Kyung Suk’s hyperrealism paintings portray a different style of hyperrealism compared to the western style because of the way she combines her own style of Korean art characteristics with elements of “Pop Art”. Hyperrealism started in Korea in the mid 1970’s from imitating the western style of hyperrealism paintings. As time passed, it started to show an independent style of art. The new wave of post modernism in the 1980’s was seen as a new opportunity for most young artists. However, this was not a total expropriation but a partial expropriation of a new style of modeling expressions. The domestic hyperrealism paintings were unlike the western style which looked at reality with a fixed view. Thus the subjectivity of the artist that may have been affected by the possibility of diverse interpretation could not be overlooked. It does not show a common style of hyperrealism but rather differs from artist to artist according to each artist’s personalities and characteristics. The Korean hyperrealism painters are looking for ways to make their paintings more independent and to also keep the Korean hyperrealism ways by moving on from the traditional photographic styles to painting styles so that they can portray the realness, which could only be gathered from photographs, into their paintings, resulting in a photograph like painting. This may be the reason why hyperrealism is still very sought for in both domestic and international art markets. Artist Min Kyung Suk has always found motives and inspiration from the things she saw, and experienced in her everyday life and the things that were most familiar to her. This artist’s pieces revisits and reinterprets everyday objects such as fruit, vegetables, flowers, vases, and dolls, put into a vinyl packaging, through the identity and relationship theories of both photographs and paintings. Therefore her pieces are expressed so that the photographs look closest to pictures and vice versa. Through this, the artist tells her story and expresses her thoughts and feelings. By interpreting the artist’s stories, thoughts, and feelings, we are able to see her identity and if we can relate to the artist, that is when we are truly moved by the pieces. Valery once said, “Art always teaches us the fact that the things we look at may not be as we have seen before.” Therefore paintings are not drawings of what we interpret but rather the result of the artist’s inspirations and feelings itself towards that object. Likely, artist Min Kyung Suk loves ‘drawing’ itself using precise description of such as a photograph, and through the ‘way of drawing’, she expresses her identity. For artist Min Kyung Suk, it is not ‘how she draws’ that is important, but rather ‘what she draws’. The bottle packed in a vinyl packaging represents the current mass production society. Thus, as a medium that is projected in today’s society it is an iconic figure for the realistic problems of today. The flowers, fruits, and vegetables packed in a vinyl packaging can also be seen as a representative figure of reality and actual situations. Moreover, from a long time ago, dolls have always been a medium with the meaning of carrying out a person’s dreams for them. For example, dolls have been used as a tool by Kings who wished for immortality to extend their life from this world to the next using clay dolls. It was also used for shamanistic purposes such as the act of praying to the dolls for their hopes and dreams to come true. What the artist wanted to express through the doll inside the vinyl packaging is the loneliness of a woman, the hopes and dreams of a woman who has grown up in an overprotective environment. The shyness of not being able to act out her dreams and the shyness of not being able to express herself and keeping her hopes and dreams to herself. Also the inability to put the many thoughts she has into action. It can be seen that it represents the many children who have grown this way. The transparent vinyl packaging enables the object to be seen through the packaging. However it can also distort and refract the shape of the object. The artist selects the most realistic drawing techniques, but by using the transparent vinyl packaging, she expresses the descriptions of the distorted view of the object caused by this packaging. By capturing the close-up pictures of the objects inside the vinyl packaging, she reinterprets the everyday life purposes of these objects and recreates them in a whole new time and space with a different meaning and purpose. Wishing that these familiar and ordinary objects can be seen in a different way through her pieces, the artist not only reproduces the object itself, but also the hidden meaning, image and the true nature of the object. |
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ARTIST Criticism
