Artist Statement / Solo exhibition <Night Hunting>
The theme of this exhibition is focused on the ‘primal anxiety of an individual’ formed by the unilinear desire imposed by society through exploring formativeness through the medium of painting.
I lived mostly on rooftops from my 20 s until I got married. One question I had at the time was that parking lots and rooftop floors in Korea are uniformly painted green. Moreover, the green was not a visually relaxing or a beautiful color.
The floor of the roller skating rink that I went to when I was a child was also green, and I have anxious memories of the local bullies I met there.
So even now, the green paint floor works unpleasantly to me.
The reason why green is commonly used on parking lots and rooftop floors is that a substance called chromium oxide, which is used in urethane waterproof paint, is dark green, so additional costs are spent to make a separate color. It is interesting that Koreans’ aesthetics are formed by economic efficiency.
While preparing for the wedding and the new home, the advice and information of the people around us were surprisingly similar, which is to consider the home as an object for wealth increase The obsessive message of ‘home wealth growth’ only heightened my anxiety.
I think that humans are beings who perceive a huge world through a network in which various perspectives and desires are closely intertwined. However, the current Korean society sends the message of capitalism the strongest.
The simplification of an individual’s perspective acts as an incomplete perception of the world, and it acts as a cause for anxiety. Therefore,
I perceived the clue from ‘ which is able to recognize the missing pieces of the world, and collected and reorganized the images of public places where anxiety works, personal events related to a single message and mass media.
For example, the work <HwaMok-dong> started with the advice of an acquaintance that to answer Mok dong instead of Hwagok dong if someone asked me where I live when I was living in Hwagok dong It is an expression of the anxiety about the class index according to the ‘region where we live’ with ‘the symbolic animal’ of Gangseo gu to which Hwagok dong belongs, and a symbol of Yangcheon gu where Mok dong belongs.
The work <DinnerforPeaceandProsperity> is a work motivated by the news about the rise in local real estate related to 2018 South North Korean summit. It was interesting to find myself anxious because of the relative deprivation caused by real estate issues rather than the relief of peace on the Korean Peninsula after watching the news report.
The exhibition is a personal story of an anxious individual who has lost his or her unique desire in the society where all value standards are set at capital as if a hunter lost their ultimate target object in the dark.
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Roh Hyuntak