South Korean Art: Passage through time

This piece by Jeong Seon depicts a landscape called "Yanghwa". I chose this piece because I believe that it depicts older Korean art perfectly, it has amazing depth and the boat gives amazing perception.

Folding screens are pieces of art on well, folding screens. Usually depicting palace life or a landscape they were used keep the home draft but also gave a sense of security. Although you cannot see the folding screen in action in this piece, it still provides the basic idea of what it is.

Going further into this gallery the art starts getting more modern, Hwang Sul-jo's painting "Scenery of Gyerim" is a great example of that. The painting took a turn from pencil like drawn paintings to more oil like ones. This painting is a great example of how the passage of time changes art.

In this painting we do see a revert in styling, It seems to go back to the older stylings but keeping it new as well. This painting gives off great depth as too where al the houses are, it makes the viewer feel like they know how everything is laid out no matter how chaotic it can be.

Lee In-sung uses the roofs of buildings to provide a depth for the church in the background to show how big it really is. Lee In-sung uses warm colors for a sense of realism and allow the buildings to pop from the cool background that he painted.

In Kang, Kyung Koo's painting we see a shift in how art changed in Korea, from this point "Abstract" is the word that could be used to describe these paintings. In this painting Kang, Kyung Koo uses dark somber colors and an angle to give the viewer a sense of modern life and how lonely and lively it can be.

Park, Byoung Choon creates a contrast of colors within the painting. The background is a landscape painted in black and white with the darker patches representing trees. Then towards the top right of the painting we get to see someone parachuting down across the landscape. The black and white landscape allows the painting to be big and allow the parachuter to pop in the painting. The painting and landscape need to be huge compared to he person, to give a sense of how big the landscape is.

This landscape painting is about the DMZ which is a piece of land that is a buffer zone between North and South Korea. The red effect is actually because of the mandatory military service that South Koreans have to do, during night times they would wear Night Vision goggles and look over the landscape which they exclaimed gave it a alienated effect. The painting itself looks extremely realistic even though it completely red, the mountains are huge in the landscape and if you zoom in towards the top right you can see a village of sorts.

Ambiguity is the term that Kwon, Ki Beom uses to describe most of his paintings. The word chaos is also something that he uses to describe them also, this one being no exception. The art piece is complex but simple, each line looking like something a four year old can do but being meticulously painted in that way on purpose. It exudes chaos which is something that older korean art was not about, which was order.

This last piece of art is from the same line of works by Kwon, Ki Beom with the theme of ambiguity. The painting is mixed media on paper and is about nature when the actually looks closer. The father away the viewer is, the harder it is to see what is about, making it ambiguous. Chaos is also in effect here, flowers and leaves are every where painted on with no order or pattern but each line is meticulously drawn. The theme is that nature is ambiguous and chaotic as it was stated before.