History and Landscape

Song has long painted the landscape of division. He travels through borderline regions to paint the scenery that come under his historical awareness.

The artist casts a message of awakening for the situation of the divided North and the South, which now feels almost ordinary. It is the artist's warning against Korea's remaining a divided nation. 

This piece depicts the scene of an armed runaway soldier being shot to death, which was published on a newspaper at the time. 

This green, chosen as the complementary color for the cruel scene of red flowing blood, conveys not only peace but also produces the effect of the red being impressed to the mind even more clearly. 

Lee organizes the canvas by juxtaposing the sea viewed from his hometown, Geoje Island, and the DMZ that he saw through night vision goggles during his military service. 

The landscape looks like a utopica but in fact embodies a dystopia, destroyed by men. The piece holds on to the disappearing scenery of Korea and reveals nostalgia for the vanishing past, and arranges elements of the division such as...

...warships, cannonballs, collapsed buildings and barbed-wire fences on the canvas as a metaphor for our painful history and reality. 

A painting of a otherized view, where the two flags of the divided Korea are raised in the DMZ, a symbol of the division. On top of it, Kim collages onomatopoeia and mimetic words from cartoons in order to render the view even more bizarre. 

It is a very strange landscape, far from our daily lives. The hostile standoff between the North and the South is surrounded by unknown, dismal air. 

The barbed-wire fence that he had faced while in military service, dazed from the propaganda broadcasts, was beyond a physical border a transcendental and mental wall, a representation of it. 

This work of painting portrays the vast, stunning wire fences extending through the beautiful mountains of Goseong, that remain as profound afterimages. It is a work dedicated to youth, both of the past and future. 

This landscapes of silent fields, following the wavy lines of field banks and leading far into the DMZ, is the frontline where anxiety still flows. Only birds cross over the borders freely. 

The fields where the artist's father had spent his entire life, awake in spring to embrace the night sky's stars. In the fall, migratory birds visit the fields and fill up the cold, empty sky over the winter. 

However, the dark grey sky that extends into the DMZ near sundown brings heavy silence along with the massive land and reveals the wounds of the war. 

The flowing lines and straight lines drawn on the fields are in fact the history of war, the struggling postwar lives of Cheorwon residents. The artist portrays the beautiful lives of those people, who leave clear traces of life and vanish into history. 

This painting portrays the winter of Cheorwon. In the painting, a dong lies down on the road in dreary winter, along with traffic signs that point to opposite directions and shadows of people. In the sky, a helicopter transports containers. 

This piece records the artist's impressions of the division while travelling in Cheorwon. It appears realistic, but in fact is a virtual landscape. 

Yang has been capturing the wounds of the world by taking pictures of people met in daily life and gathering pictures from the press. The artist's paintings, where affection and compassion interwine, are bound to collide with how the artist sees the world. In this painting...

...the artist states our common experience with the utterance, "Some nights I followed the long shadows." It is not clearly visible where the people on the bottom of the painting are headed, and the ad balloon is also distant, like the past or the future. 

This is intended as a metaphor for situations in which we believed we were progressing but also had an unshakable anxiety or fear of some kind.