Waterway Artist Kang Kyung-koo has been searching for the way of adopting and transforming tradition in Korean painting by the serial works like , . In the series of , featuring massive effect of piled thick ink and chalk, Kang Kyung-koo captured the sensibility of the city by filling the scenery with realistic landscape of Bukhansan, Hangang, and Jamsil. And then in the series of , returning to a subject of nature, he roughly and crudely filled the scenery with landscape of ideal forest without a certain time and place. Kang Kyung-koo’s painting, at first glance, looks like Western painting in that his dense composition differs from conventional ink painting where subtle tones and void spaces are prior consideration, but it retains the strong and thrilling taste of ink. His works of art, for this reason, are appraised as adopting methods of Western painting and interpreting traditional Korean painting liberally and approaching Korean painting seriously. In this exhibition Kang Kyung-koo presents series. Encountering the Ganges during the travel to India served him a momentum that he took the water as a new subject of his work. That’s a sacred place of Hinduism where every Hindu wants to soak in his body at least once in a lifetime; and that’s a place where ashes of dead body scattered, corpse floated away, clothes washed and bodies bathed; and that’s a place where life and death meet like that, life and death divided because of the meeting. At the endless road of flowing water, Kang Kyung-koo found the universal truth of human life like birth and death, meeting and parting. The water will flow ever after dividing the world. The artist put an ultimate question of life and death to us through the road of water flowing leisurely. This exhibition is expected to be a chance to think about that question.
Prev
Next
EXHIBITIONS
Artworks