People

A large group of people are heading somewhere, loosely zigzagging in the painting. The vertically long canvas creates a perspective, in which the lower one looks, the closer the distance is to the viewers: such a perspective is emphasized by the way Ungno renders human figures as larger in the lower portion than those in the upper. The painting uses traditional mediums such as ink and hanji, and gives a bird’s eye-view, a perspective commonly used in East Asian paintings, while showing its modernity in the way it represents a wide view only with simplified human forms. The human forms that appear in the People series evoke, on the one hand, his paintings of a bamboo forest filled with trees and leaves. On the other hand, the forms are related to his Abstract Letter series in terms of their pictographic quality.