[석철주 전시 리뷰] 신 몽유도원도

Artist turns classics into fantasy

 

 

About forty years ago, a teenager had to give up his dream of becoming a baseball player due to injury. To cheer him up, his father sent the boy to learn from a famous Korean painter who lived next door. The painter was Lee Sang-bum, one of Korea's most celebrated artists.

Slowly but passionately the boy discovered his talent for art. After learning from Lee for six years, until the teacher passed away, the boy was ready to create his own style of art.

The lucky boy was Suk Chul-joo, who is now an artist famed for his experimental Korean paintings.

Perhaps it was the dramatic event at an early age that made Suk so open to everything -- from art materials or themes to even fashion. The artist, who will turn 60 next year, still dresses and looks as if he is only in his late forties.

"I have to grow my beard to look old," he said with a chuckle, in a press conference this month.

Although Korean painting is one of the most conventional genres of art, Suk was at pains to diversify the themes. He showcased the "masked dance" series in the 1980s, "pottery" series in the 1990s and his "plant image" series in the early 2000s.

Another notable thing about his art is that he uses western acrylic paint for his Korean paintings instead of the Chinese black ink.

"I create images on the canvas by erasing it, not filling it up. You can't erase Chinese ink because it soaks into the canvas. That's why I use acrylic paint. It has been more than 20 years since I started to use the material," Suk said.

He first paints the canvas with different colors of acrylic paint and erases parts of it with white paint or water. The point is to do everything before the paint completely dries out.

So the artist has to lift the gigantic canvases up and down to let the water flow well, stand up and crouch down to paint -- for eight to 10 hours straight once he starts working.

"My style of work requires lots of labor. For that, I went through knee surgery two years ago and had to quit working for several months last year because of my aching shoulder," he said.

The results of the hard labor can be found at his solo exhibition currently underway at Hakgojae Gallery in Sogyeok-dong, Seoul.

This exhibition, showcasing about 50 of Suk's paintings, is divided into two sections -- one which represents fantasy and another which represents reality.

In the first section, visitors can find the latest versions of Suk's famous fantasy-like landscape paintings. He has strikingly reinterpreted classic masterpieces by the old masters of the Joseon Dynasty including An Gyeon's "Scenery in dream."

Painted in pastel tone colors, Suk's "New Scenery in dream" appears closer to a fantasy land than the original, which was done in black Chinese ink.

The other section showcases paintings more grounded in reality, such as ceramics or green fields.

Suk used a more aggressive form of his erasing method for these paintings -- he scraped some of the paint off for delicate depictions of the grass, for example.

"The spaces that appear while it is being erased, I think those are what we call 'the beauty of the margin' in oriental paintings," he said.

The exhibition runs through Aug. 20 at Hakgojae Gallery in Sogyeok-dong, central Seoul. The gallery is closed from Aug. 1 to 10. For more information, call (02) 737-4435 or visit www.hakgojae.com

(claire@heraldm.com)

By Park Min-young