Yoo Geun-Taek (유근택) - 'Dialogue' l Riveruns l ENG

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Artist
Yoo Geun-Taek
'Dialogue'

Yoo Geun-Taek’s works are constructed from beginning to end through the artist’s own bodily action. He affixes multiple layers of thick hanji and draws or colors on top, after which he soaks the face of the painting with water, toughens it with an iron brush, and layers color again. Notably, all these steps involve traces of the artist’s own body and physical force. In particular, the labor-intensive process of rubbing smooth hanji with a jagged iron brush hundreds or even thousands of times demands an immense level of energy. Through this process, the artist actively and directly intervenes on the materiality and surface of his work, not only deconstructing its surface but ironically also conjuring a space hidden beyond the surface to construct a new spatiality. In Yoo’s own words, when the elusive scenery beneath wet surface emerges like a “ghostly” presence through rubbing of the iron brush, the delineation between real and pictorial space is demolished, while the landscape we gaze upon and our own existence come to cross paths. Furthermore, the artist must finish his work within a short period of three to four days when paper is still wet – with intense concentration on brush and iron brush, he layers fleeting moments of the present into a continuum. This dense temporality comes to exist within the work as but a moment, an instant, an ongoing present.

#한국작가#화가#contemporaryart#noble#dignity