Skew Gallery is pleased to present it's first solo exhibition of gallery artist Min Hyung's paintings and sculpture. This new work depicts the central characters of an imagined alternate universe filled with parallel human emotions of love, aggression, joy and passivity, and the collective life experiences that generate such feelings. Responding to the craze of the inter-active video game/world such as Second Life, Hyung invites the viewer into her imagination where paintings and sculpture serve as both artifact and gateways. Hyung's work depicts a captivating journey into her fantastical Fifth World filled with unearthly primates of mythological proportions, visually describing their sexual energy, intense competition and the events that transpire as they navigate the depths of Hyung's thoughts. Meanwhile Hyung's work explores notions of obsession, escapism universality and human de-evolution.
The Fifth World: An Introduction presents the ape-like characters in Hyung's epic tale/alter-reality in portraiture fashion. Forgoing the commonplace subject of the world she operates in, Hyung traverses the landscape of her imagination and unleashes extraordinary visual elements, places and characters from her mind's eye. Similar to the way that J.R.R. Tolkien's masterpiece novels The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings is comprised of a superfluous information of connected body of tales, poems, fictional histories, maps, several invented languages, and literary essays to tell the story of the imagined world of Middle Earth; Hyung also needs to create the extraneous details of both the characters and the world that they occupy, in order to convincingly bring them visually to life. Hyung utilizes paint and technique, as her vernacular of choice in storey-telling, with text as her appendixes. The resulting paintings are brazenly executed; Hyung injects into her paint handling the same intensity, energy and visceral response as she imagines her subjects to possess.
This particular sub-series are scenes from a place within The Fifth World called SEXAQUARIUM, which as theme explores the notions of sex and the isolated network of aquarium life. Big aquariums give feeling of a whole different reality, so vast, so foreign, so powerful, colourful and imaginative; where an abundance of continuous and simultaneous action is taking place. Aquariums are immediately captivating and draw the viewers in with its constant motion.
After food and survival, sex is the biggest motivation in life; sex is colourful, full of movement, vibrant and dynamic. Combining these two concepts I am able to make analogies of the intimate and omnipotent world of our secret sexual desire that may or may not lay dormant in our minds. My work is story based, although self directed it offers the viewer universality; where viewer can relate through visualization of an image and the thoughts, feelings, expectations subconscious and conscious, on our internal world.
The greats that addressed four dimensional space in painting and science, like Cezanne's tactile space of non perspectivity, Picasso's multi-aspect view of a scene, Braque's materialization of space, Kandinsky's angles, triangles, lines and colors, Hofmann's push and pull, Da Vinci's "painting is conceptual" and Einstein's theory of relativity; was a motivating impetus for my creation of The Fifth World. I create my own interpretation of fourth dimensional painting and my own concept of spacial depth in fourth dimensional space. I create the Fifth World through fourth dimensional space, in this world there is no focal point. In the Fifth World the fourth dimension is illusionistic space. This world is based on a similar idea as the cyber world or the 'matrix'. My Fifth World is a concept of a 'matrix type world'. I am passionate about combining art with science and technology in creating a Utopian experience for the viewer. In creating this experience I prefer to use painting which is a warm, organic and emotional experience, it has texture and invites touch, rather than using the digital method which is cold. The space is in constant motion and flux; there is constant rotation of back and forth, up and down, push and pull. This space is active.
I accomplish this by applying multi-layers, each layer suggested space, offers a different view, and this is done transparent to create an illusionistic view. This illusionistic view pulls the viewer in, even though you are here, outside looking in you can be there inside looking in and experiencing the Fifth World. The viewer is pulled into the painting, my work is not about a quick "getting it" experience, and rather it takes time to see the whole painting. The lines, cubes triangles and organic shapes of juxtaposing images are put together and relates to and against each other in constant flux, they are structured, de-structured and restructured; a sense of chaos is essential in my painting. Viewers can assembled puzzles (lines, cubes, triangles and organic shapes of juxtaposing images which already have a story line from me) to create their own story line in my imaginary world. It is my belief that lines do not have to merge into a single focal point, the lines that goes out from my scenes in different directions, for example, The Fifth World: scene No. 1, creates multi- aspect views of a scene.
I paint not only to confuse or show the illusionistic world, but also to pull the viewer into the painting, into the Fifth World. I combine technology with organic to create the Fifth World, and to present a total experience as one experiences in the real world. Painting is abstract, the world I want to build is abstract yet organic, and it offers the same experience as a cyber world. Painting is like a PC, it has a flat surface, and like a computer screen it is an open door to a world of experiences. The PC experience is cold. The canvas flat surface leads to a door that opens to a Utopian world that is warm and organic. Painting becomes real because experience is real.
Drawing from the energy of the unpredictable yet inevitable geological events that contour the earth, Min Hyung’s spontaneous/logical paintings address the indelible links between our past and the present. Like tectonic plates, the varied layers of paint shift over one another, creating rumblings and disturbances, constructing and deconstructing spaces and depths. Each layer—whether composed of fine, linear drawings; thin washes of colour; or chunky, generous dabs of paint—alternately emerges or disappears in relation to one another. Among these shifting layers lies an exploration of the evolution of need and an awareness of how these emergent desires alter our environment.
Hyung describes her brightly coloured paintings as worlds of motion, flux, shifting languages—old and new—and contemporary references that are evolving and finding new translations. The canvases speak both to physical structures and to the foundations upon which contemporary society is built: the desire for and pursuit of protection, of secure living spaces. The sprawling villas, the cars, the idle times by the poolside, she suggests, are gestures back to humanity’s long-fought odyssey for comfort and shelter. Deploying these contemporary visual references—architecture, luxury commodities—Hyung’s paintings are concerned with space and how space can describe us individually or collectively, as a culture.
The most striking element to Hyung’s work is perhaps the vibrant populations of her signature “blobs” which undulate through paintings like Oe Island or Where is "In the line of fire playing" in glossy waves. The blobs operate as a language through which the viewer is invited to navigate and resolve the painting: they form sentences, statements, and stories; they play against each other, humming, conflicting, stimulating, and unifying in a gestalt of colour. Ultimately, each bright marble of paint relates to one another individually and communally; they each require space, have their own evolutionary needs, and yet exist necessarily within a collective.
In Blow Spaces Away From The Whirling Blades of The Fan and The Curtain Rises, the blobs are openly connected to the individual; they exist within the sinuous outlines of swimming and diving female figures. The contrast of these organic figural lines with sharply geometric architectural lines references our longing to exist within a golden mean of carefully articulated spaces. In the end, Hyung’s vivid and shifting picture planes address the search for a balance in our environmental desires. We exist simultaneously within our own bubbles of physical and psychological space as well as within the spaces needed to be part of a collective culture and society.
The series 'Looking for My Vocabulary' is about searching for a personal painterly language by re-interpreting existing visual languages: holiday resort architecture, art historical references and cinematic camera angles. I drop the colour from the source reference, interpret the material in muted tones and line and then, at the last stage of the painting, throw the colour back onto the canvas. I want to create an atmosphere of optical confusion by combining abstraction and illusionistic space. It's a world of motion, flux, old languages, and new translations.
August 2010
