Seung Ho Yoo
HAK KWON (Crane martial art)
2020

About the Item

About ‘Hak Kwon’ Hak Kwon is a phonetic representation of the Korean characters 학 and 권. The Korean word Hak means crane and Kwon refers to a kind of martial arts. About Seungho YOO’s Work He represents our inner aspects while illustrating fragmented images and words in his works. That is, he tries to free our thoughts and visualize them. Of course, his work derives from his own individual thoughts but he comments on the source and center we have to reach. After all, his work can be seen as a process of generating a lofty or boundless state rather than crossing the line between his intrinsic nature and the world as well as the inner self and the external world through his diverse experimental practices. To him, however, this sublimity differs from loftiness and rather verges on puerility. We can infer this from the fact that all of his works and their titles appear whimsical and his childish attitude is one of the significant elements of his art. His works reviewed above are different but manage to all be vibrant, puerile, liberal, lighthearted, and lively yet in a sense they are also imbued with his serious, heavy agony as an artist. His work seems anchored in his diverse personality. As he once mentioned, this resembles ancient scholars’ notion of art as a moral training and the theory of literary painting which states that a painter’s mind is reflected onto his painting and calligraphy. Although his works are composed of paring down images painted suddenly on a whim, they are in fact steadily rendered one by one with great care and pure spirit, revealing the artist himself as a whole. Excerpt from ‘Childishly and Splendidly Frolicking’ by Seung oh SHIN, Director at Perigee Gallery (Foreword from the exhibition ‘Shaking your hair loose’ catalogue, 2015, Perigee Gallery) ARTIST STATEMENT My work focuses on the relationship between ‘Writing and Drawing’. From a distance, it appears to be a drawn image but a closer look reveals innumerable minute handwriting strewn over. Therefore, my work is comprised of tiny texts but seen as an image as well. I began to create ‘Text painting’ due to the fascination with blurry brush strokes of Ink wash painting, i.e. smudged contours of Chinese ink on mulberry paper. Such interest towards blurredness has expanded to dismantling the borders between traditional oriental painting and scribble, brush and pencil, and uniqueness and reduplication. ‘Text painting’ is often composed of onomatopoeic or mimetic words. Piles of tiny texts such as ‘Shoo Shoo Shoo-(슈슈슈-)¹', ‘Eng Eng Eng Eng~(앵앵앵앵~)²’, ‘Ung~Ung(엉~엉)³’, ‘Ya~ho(야~호)⁴’, ‘Woo Soo Soo Soo(우수수수)⁵’, ‘Joo roo roo rook(주루루룩)⁶’, and ‘Ung-geum Ung-geum(엉금엉금)⁷’ together form into an image. ‘Echowords’, a term that refers to ‘imitating language’, represents my work. 1. Sound of wind, wave, or flying 2. Buzzing 3. Crying loudly 4. Yahoo 5. Rustling down 6. Sound of falling rain 7. Crawling

Creator:

Seung Ho Yoo (1974, Korean)

Creation Year:

2020

Dimensions:

Height: 16.15 in (41 cm)Width: 11.7 in (29.7 cm)

More Editions & Sizes:

UniquePrice: $1,200

Medium:

Paper,Ink

Movement & Style:

Contemporary