- Winky (2016)
- Bob (2016)
- Wikiwakiwoo (2016)
- Tequila Hangover (2013)
- Piero (2016)
- Pan (2013)
- Nemesis (2015)
- Kuuipo (2016)
- Moretta (2015)
- Kitty (2014)
- Bacchus (2016)
- Concubine (2015)
—click on any image to enlarge—
As a Korean-born artist, I am interested in the intersection of Asian pop visual culture and American post-war painting. My oil paintings are portraits of animal-human hybrids. They are beings that have gone through some kind of transformative journey, through the process of built up of form and figure and paint and surface. Erasing, rendering, smearing, modeling. I like the tension of having the range of illustrative figures, then loose, floppy paint obliterating the figure, letting abstraction come through, finding the balance. In my paintings, I foster multiple positions in the cultural, anthropomorphic and art historical identities.
As a child, I was weaned on Hello Kitty and various other hopelessly cute dolls and fluffy animals. Later, as an art student in United States, I felt nourished by Phillip Guston, Willem DeKooning, and also Italian painters like Caravaggio. I think of my characters as distant cousins of imagined creatures, avatars of anxiety, lust and longing. They iterate playfulness with dark underpinnings. Maybe underneath the sugary puff balls and banal gaze, it’s all guts and turmoil and existential crisis. I hope the viewer can sense the edge of East/West, Abstract/Figurative.
The fragmental element in my life becomes whole in my art.