Delicious landscape, the Utopia of Modern People
CC Exhibition Participating Artist Haru.K
Summary
- Article
- Exhibition
- #Oriental Painting
- #Exhibition Participating Artists
- #Modern Man
- #Landscape
- # Utopia
Artist Haru.K
Haru. K graduated from the Department of Oriental Painting, Hongik University College of Art, and with a master’s degree in art from the same college. Unlike conventional landscape paintings, which mainly interpret the life and death of the traditional landscape painting utilizing modern meanings of recording and collection, and providing mental utopia through the action of observing, recording, and collecting the landscape of life, the artist works to portray the utopia of modern people that pursue the spiritual and material at the same time. Haru. K participated in twelve private exhibitions, including Jeong-woong Ha’s Youth Author Invitation Exhibition of the Year 「Strange Parasitic Houseguest Haru. K’s Spicy Seafood Noodle of Change」 (The Ha Jeong-woong Museum of Art, 2019) and numerous team exhibitions, such as 「Un-Tact」(Asia Culture Center, 2020), 「Carbohydrate Hygge」(Daejeon Municipal Creation Center, 2020), 「Nom Nom Landscape」(Suwon Municipal Art Gallery, 2020), etc. Haru.K received the Shinsegae Art Award in 2013 and the Ha Jeong-woong Youth Artist Award in 2015 and worked as a residency artist in the Creation Studio of Uijae Culture Foundation and Gwangju Museum of Art.
- dudghs21@hanmail.net
- http://harukim.net/
Modern people are always tired. They have to make a living while busily earning their bread every day. When they think of the uncertainty of the future, they become uneasy and anxious. A repetitious daily life is boring. They vaguely dream of escape. Where do they long to go? On weekends, a long line of cars is busy leaving the bustling city. They all head to nature, where mountains, beaches, and rivers are. They love to eat delicious food in the arms of peaceful nature. It seems like the happiness the ordinary people pursue is nothing complicated or great. Any healthy person will be satisfied with merely being mentally relaxed and materially sufficient.
There is an artist who expresses the primitive minds of modern people through painting. It is interesting to see the works of an artist who uses the stage name of Haru. K. A variety of foods appear here and there from the natural landscape as if finding a hidden picture in a game, or the figures of nature are often described like foods. Moreover, the works look as if small and large people and objects are quietly telling us a story. It is an unfamiliar combination that we cannot imagine easily. In a word, it is surreal. His works give off a modern impression at the same time utilizing the content and format of the traditional oriental painting. He also used both materials from oriental and western paintings. It is a form of art reminiscent of a bowl of delicious spicy seafood noodles mixed with various contents, formats, and materials. Why did he start to pursue this kind of art?
Haru. K, who has loved to draw since his childhood, started learning oriental painting due to the influence of the director of the art academy he attended to enter high school for the arts, and ended up majoring in oriental painting in university as well. However, he started to have doubts while studying oriental painting. Why are there so many rules to follow when drawing oriental paintings? Why does oriental painting always look like an old picture? Why can’t oriental paintings receive the adoration of the younger generation? While continuing various attempts with these questions, one interesting proposal came upon him in 2012. Namdo Folk Food Museum in Gwangju was preparing for artists exchanging exhibitions between Gyeongsang-do Province and Jeolla-do Province, and Haru. K was requested to work on a historical and cultural approach with Hwagae Market Site in its center. While sketching the landscape of the Hwagae Market Site as one of the participants, one great idea popped up into his mind. He thought, adding the features of the natural landscape instead of foods on a well-prepared meal would be fun and meaningful. This way, he thought people might feel more interested in the work compared to other oriental paintings with outdated impressions. He arranged a few dishes on the table and drew in the image of mountains and bodies of water. 「A Delicious Landscape」 started just like that. This is the moment when his exclusive world of art opened.
Working on the collaborative work 「A Delicious Landscape」, Haru. K tried multiple variations and clarified what he wanted to express. In his first work of 2012, he drew a landscape instead of food, which led to his later works that combined the traditional landscape painting and food. The traditional landscape painting is an image that portrays the ideal image of nature that the old classical scholars pursued. They wanted to devote themselves to their studies and cultivate their mind and body, contemplating the reasons of nature when they eventually go back to nature while enjoying the unworldly landscape paintings. In other words, the nature that appears in the traditional landscape painting was equivalent to their mental utopia—seeing these traditional landscape paintings, Haru. K deliberately thought about what utopia would look like to modern men. To Haru. K, modern people were those who pursue both mental and material satisfaction and want those two aspects to be harmonized. He placed the traditional landscape painting as the mental utopia in the background and brought out food as a symbol of material abundance here and there within the image. He also did not miss out on portraying the images of modern people resting and enjoying their lives within the new utopia he created. In this work, he chose colorful natural foods, such as grapes, shrimp, mushrooms, etc., and made sure that they blend in with the landscape. This was the period that he focused on the overall composition and visual effects.
Haru. K, who was concerned about how to portray the utopia of the modern people, started thinking about the material of the work. He gradually started to think that the materials of the work would be represented more naturally if they came from experience rather than the imagination of the authors. An opportunity came to portray these concepts in an artwork. It was the exhibition held by Gwangju Shinsegae Gallery with Bogildo as its topic in 2018. For this exhibition, 17 artists presented various works with their unique sensibilities after investigating the history, culture, nature, and other details of Bogildo, including the historic sites related to Gosan Yun Seon-do. While investigating Bogildo, Haru. K sketched various objects and landscapes he came across. After he got back to his atelier, he combined and edited all the sketches to create a new image. Then, he moved his sketch into a drawing of an object and moved it once again to a larger screen. This careful working process is crucial as drawings on hwaseonji cannot be edited. Also, he tried various expressions by using the materials that are often used in western paintings, such as acrylic gouache other than the paint used in oriental paintings. Looking at 「Edited Scape (Bogildo Travel Story)」, which went through these processes, it is highly fantastic. Just like the delicious food inside the bamboo picnic container he discovered in Bipawon, Bogildo, the image includes Bogildo’s mountain, water, and pavilion, and the branches with loquat fruits embrace the surroundings. The water overflown from the container also creates another small landscape. Within this landscape, people are enjoying fishing or swimming. This is an image of utopia that combined reality and illusion. After this work, Haru. K has been continuing his work with the places and foods that he experienced as subject matters.
(Jeong Woong Ha’s Youth Author Invitation Exhibition - Strange Parasitic Houseguest Haru.K’s Spicy Seafood Noodle of Change)
In 2019, a very important exhibition for Haru. K was held. He had the opportunity to open a private exhibition in the youth artist invitation exhibition of the Ha Jeong-woong Art Museum within the Gwangju Municipal Art Museum. At his private invitation exhibition with an unusual title 「Strange Parasitic Houseguest Haru. K’s Spicy Seafood Noodle of Change」, he presented various works from the plane and three-dimensional structure to installation. From many works presented in this invitation exhibition, the artist chose 「A Delicious Landscape (Spicy Seafood Noodle of Change)」 as his representative work. In this image, a bowl of spicy seafood noodles is placed in a background surrounded by trees, rocks, and a pavilion, and someone outside the screen is picking up the noodles with chopsticks. In Spicy Seafood Noodle of Change, which means ‘making changes as a progress’, we see that this is what he pursues in his life as well as his works. Spicy seafood noodle is a word that metaphorically shows the identity of the work, which indicates his working style where many things are mixed. Therefore, it is enough to say that 「A Delicious Landscape(Spicy Seafood Noodle of Change)」symbolizes the world of art he pursues. The funny part is that a small incident occurred at this invitation exhibition. Looking at the work 「A Delicious Landscape (Spicy Seafood Noodle of Change)」 closely, a small person is standing on the tip of the chopsticks. This small person is hanging an object that resembles the flags of all nations, which portrays how the artist celebrates the exhibition. Haru. K did not stop here, but he installed the flags at the exhibition to create an atmosphere similar to the opening of a Chinese restaurant. Was it thanks to a delicious-looking bowl of spicy seafood noodles and the flags? One visitor actually asked the docent where the Chinese restaurant was located.
Due to COVID-19, society was in a state of confusion last year. Many cultural art events were suddenly canceled or postponed. Nevertheless, many meaningful exhibitions that chose the issue in the same period as topics were held here and there. ACC’s [Un-tact] was one of them. It was a title that reflected the social atmosphere, where people tried to communicate with each other without making contacts to avoid the contamination of the virus. Seven artists from Gwangju, Beijing, Shanghai, Taipei, and Tokyo were invited to this exhibition. When he first received the invitation to the exhibition, Haru. K was working on his piece with ‘lunch box’ as the topic. While traveling to mountains and fields for site sketching, Haru. K felt like the people he met at the site treated nature as easily consumed disposable objects rather than objects of awe. This is how he started portraying nature like food inside a lunch box. The lunch box was an image associated with the situation where many people had to eat alone due to the pandemic. For these reasons, he exhibited 「Edited Scape (H’s Lunch Box)」 at the [Un-tact] exhibition. While working on this project, Haru. K recollected the main character H. H inside the picture is an ordinary office worker and the head of household. After having trouble finding a place to go for a vacation with his family, he heads to a secluded forest and a valley with lunch boxes. The family sets up a tent, flies a kite, and enjoys swimming. This can be seen as a cultural landscape of this era. There is another interesting aspect in this picture. At the bottom right corner of the image, a paper band used to wrap a lunch box is seen, with a traditional oriental painting drawn on it. This picture is ｢Nest of Rocks on a Plain (窠石平遠圖)」by artist Kwak Hee (1023~1085) from Northern Song Dynasty, China. Where this paper band slid down, trees and rocks similar to the landscape of 「Nest of Rocks on a Plain」 are drawn with chopsticks. This contrast shows that Haru. K’s works are based on the classics but was reinterpreted with a modern sensibility.
As shown above, Haru. K shows lots of interest in studying the traditional oriental paintings and giving them new life with a contemporary perspective and sentiment. In this sense, he is continuing his own experiment with free format while recognizing the style and materials of the traditional oriental painting, but at the same time taking a closer look at the social changes and people’s lives. He thinks this attitude and effort is a way for him to remain a good artist. Just like his stage name that still thinks about the social role granted to him, he is striving to be the best rather than expecting luck.
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Written by Jong-Ok Baek.icezug@hanmail.net
Photo. Haru.K dudghs21@hanmail.net
2021.09
