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Again, we find ourselves putting together a special issue on painting. The concept is a continuation of “Painting: Is It Changing?” from our December 2020 issue, and the keyword this time is “abstract.” We live in a day and age in which the word “abstract” has become ambiguous, yet abstraction does unquestionably exist before us as a creative phenomenon. We recall this abstraction in terms of “painting.” How has painting preserved its identity in the contemporary landscape? How does it respond to a fast-changing visual environment? What are the critical issues in 21st-century painting? Are there any truly new transformations? What distinguishes young painters in their 30s and 40s from the generations that came before them? How has painting incorporated today’s environment of omniscient smartphones? How should we view the future of painting? Art has put together a large-scale issue that asks and answers some of these contemporary questions about painting. To begin with, six experts used “abstraction” as a standard for selecting a group of painters in their 30s and 40s. These experts were Kho Chung-hwan, Kim Yong-dae, Ahn Soyeon, Yoo Jinsang, Michael Lim (aka Chungwoo Lee), and Hyun Seewon. Together, they selected 39 artists in all. To compile images of the selected artists’ work, the editorial board categorized them into four subtopics based on form, content, materials, and techniques. These subtopics are “Flatness and Materiality: The Endless Battle,” “New Abstraction: Meta-Formative-Practice,” “Painting Expands in Time and Space,” and “Beyond the Boundaries of Expression: The Hybrid Forest.” Second, an online roundtable was organized to conduct contemporary painting discourse. There, Kim Boggi, Yoo Jinsang, and Michael Lim examined currents in contemporary art to illuminate the role of painting from multiple perspectives. In the process, they paid close attention to examples of overseas work and painting trends among young Korean artists.

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Beyond the Boundaries of Expression: The Hybrid Forest

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A restoration of the image in painting coincided with the rise of postmodernism. The use of the image here differs from the methodologies of the modernist era. On the canvas, abstraction, which was no longer the artistic language of “purity” and “autonomy,” coexisted with the figurative, which was not representational. The either-or formulas equating abstraction with form and figurativeness with content collapsed. It was the dawn of the era of “pluralism” in painting methodologies, with the rise of hybrid painting forms blending the figurative with the abstract. Amid the newfound emphasis on the spatial quality of the canvas, artists have mixed a wide variety of aesthetic grammars, including division, overlapping, protrusion, narrativity, and allegory. Established internal genre distinctions have also lost their meaning: the paintings of the postmodern era are like “all-in-one” products, combining landscapes with still-lifes and portraits. These are internal landscapes, landscapes of memory, which incorporate opposing concepts of real and imaginary, visible and invisible, figurative and abstract, utopian and dystopian, collective and individual, form and content, engagement and purity. This section spotlights paintings that are truly hybrids—undefinable in terms of any style or “-ism.” Woo Jeongsu contemplates the structure of contemporary society by painting shapes from which narrative has been stripped away, leaving only the abstract shapes and material of “post-meaning.” With her concise color fields reminiscent of architecture, Hejum Bä presents the viewer with a “mystery game” regarding abstraction, figurativeness, and painting. In some cases, artists deconstruct boundaries by representing objects in abstract forms. Kim Hyeseon uses thick matière to present imaginary landscapes of rippling waves, while Yi Yi Jeong Eun employs her vibrant brushstrokes to capture the energy and animation of natural landscapes. Shim Woohyun uses short, broken brushstrokes to visualize the energy of wildflowers in the forest, while skillfully concealing intimate small-scale narratives within the works. You Hyeon Kyeong produces portraits of people she knows in coarse brushstrokes, employing techniques such as incompleteness and bold erasure as she explores the expressionist potential of abstraction. Still other artists adhere to the typical practices of figurative painting, while incorporating the implicative attitude and spirit of abstraction. Moon Sungsic creates his own form of narrative by combining a Korean atmosphere with abstract brushstrokes, while Nam Jinu uses fairytale-like images to represent beings who have become monsters in an irrational world.

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Kim Hyeseon, 〈Twilight Cultivation(黃昏修心) 2020-1〉, oil on canvas, 72.7×90.9cm 2020.

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Kim Hyeseon Kim Hyeseon’s paintings are reminiscent of rippling waves. Describing these abstract landscapes, the artist has called them an “expression of the texture of wind.” On her long horizontal canvases, she uses self-designed knives to apply thick layers of paint, creating a unique texture while mixing together intense colors. Though she does not represent real landscapes, the seascapes she creates seem as though they might exist somewhere—evoking a feeling of déjà vu.

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Yi Yi Jeong Eun, 〈There, the Sunset_201948〉, oil on canvas, 162×112cm 2019.

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Yi Yi Jeong Eun Before embarking on abstract painting, Yi Yi Jeong Eun created labor-intensive images of products placed close together in supermarket displays. With her use of thick matières and powerful strokes, she transformed her approach into abstract representations of the natural landscapes and inner worlds associated with particular times and places. For her motifs, she looks to landscapes that she has chanced upon in her day-to-day life or discovered while traveling. Her work vividly conveys the energy and animation of the land, which serves as a matrix for life in its endless generation and propagation.

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Shim Woohyun, 〈Deer Hunt〉, oil on linen, 215×295cm 2014

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Shim Woohyun Shim Woohyun’s canvases depict the beautiful forest landscapes that have enchanted the artist since her childhood. With boldly colored brushstrokes, broken and layered, she conveys the primal vitality of forest wildflowers, which remain unfamiliar and dangerous. The result resembles an “all over” abstract painting, though human faces and animal and insect forms peek out through the composition. In addition to the external qualities of the forest, the artist also depicts the teeming life that propagates within it. Perhaps she is adroitly concealing a secret small-scale narrative that indicates toward the primitive eros instinct or a sensual experience.

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Hejum Bä, 〈Illiteracy Adventure〉, acrylic on canvas, 112.2×145.5cm 2019

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Hejum Bä The basic units of Hejum Bä’s paintings are pure experiences and ideas that cannot be defined in terms of any specific meaning. Her work is characterized by a bold use of color fields reminiscent of fauvism. The color field shapes that form her canvases evoke architectural structures and natural landscapes. Since 2019, Bä has sought to visualize the internal aspects of the canvas through the concept of “plot.” Exploring the colors and density of her paints and the boundaries of the color field, she presents a “mystery game” related to abstraction and painting.

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Nam Jinu, 〈The Protector〉, oil on fabric, fabric collage, 126×100cm 2020

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Nam Jinu Nam Jinu uses the giant squid, an animal he has loved since his childhood, as a key motif in his work. His body of work collectively constitutes an epic poem dedicated to those whose outsider status in an irrational world has driven them to become monsters themselves. In this work, Nam shows an animal disguised as a tree, as though to conceal its identity. The beast’s body is fragmented into fairytale images, disrupting a world of good-and-evil dichotomies. In a single image, the artist presents a multilayered allegory of squid, tree, and monstrosity.

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Woo Jeongsu, 〈All of Our Yesterdays〉, acrylic and ink on canvas, 126×100cm 2020

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Woo Jeongsu To better understand the systems of contemporary society, Woo Jeongsu has read various books and compulsively renders images from films, noted paintings, and illustrations in his work. Since the artist abandoned his fixation on narrative, his canvases have frequently included shapes that eschew meaning and forms that emphasize materiality. In these images, the figurative and abstract overlap. Recently, he has been working on two-dimensional pieces in which canvases of great length and breadth are positioned to create the effect of “wallpaper.”

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You Hyeon Kyeong, 〈Backward 1〉, oil on canvas, 194×130cm 2013

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You Hyeon Kyeong For You Hyeon Kyeong, the act of creation is a tool employed in a kind of Zen riddle that questions her surrounding relationships in terms of identity. In her images, the faces of people she has encountered become a key focus of her expression. Her canvases include coarse brushstrokes that stop abruptly and marks of bold erasure. They come across as expressionist paintings that forcefully push the interior outward, as well as a kind of painting diary encapsulating the artist’s courage, freedom, and desires.

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Moon Sungsic, 〈My Brother and Me〉, pencil on paper, 55×75cm 2008

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Moon Sungsic This pencil drawing by Moon Sungsic revisits his childhood memories while offering a powerful display of Korean sentiments. The artist has broadened the score of his painting through the use of watercolors reminiscent of ink-and-wash techniques, as well as oils and charcoal. His pencil drawings in particular do away with either-or distinctions equating the figurative with “representation” and “content” and the abstract with “expression” and “form.” Hyun Seewon, an indepentdent curator and art critic, explains that Moon’s paintings “create new narratives and neutralize them in turn as the Korean sentiments come together with the brushstrokes of abstraction. This is a gesture that renders ambiguous the distinction between ‘abstract’ and ‘not abstract.’ ”

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This article, originally published in the July 2021 issue of Art in Culture, is provided by the Korea Art Management Service under a content provision agreement with the magazine.