A pair of waterfall paintings greets visitors at the entrance to the exhibition hall. Water plunges vertically down cliff faces. The works are titled "Major Heat" and "Minor Heat." In them one reads a human will that has endured midsummer, if only in this way. The surging water carries over to "Blue Waves" on the opposite wall. Rough seas fill the canvas, and the unrestrained brushwork overwhelms the viewer.
"Yeongdeung Wind" refers to a wind that blows on Jeju around the second lunar month. Tradition holds that Yeongdeung Halmang, the goddess of wind, visits to scatter the seeds of life across land and sea before departing. "Southward," which captures clouds drifting on a wind blowing from north to south against a sunset staining the western sky of Jeju, seems to reflect the peace of ordinary days.
Rather than depicting nature — waves, wind — as it is, the artist has put onto canvas the texture of what a human being feels before the vast changes of the natural world. This is "Small Things, Warm Welcome," a solo exhibition by Kang Yo-bae, 74, now running at Hakgojae in Sogyeok-dong, Seoul.
As the exhibition title suggests, the 28 paintings on display grow out of an attitude of looking gladly upon what is easily passed over in daily life, and out of long observation of and reverence for nature. "Painting is the work of pulling out a self that even you do not know," the artist said. "Fishing my own mind out — that is the pleasure of it." He added: "If I paint things exactly as they are, I feel as though I have become a servant to the subject, and that stifles me. My work is to see and think about many things, keep them in mind, and then draw them up and reveal them, as if fishing."
If the first half of the exhibition deals with vast natural phenomena, the second half turns to small everyday scenes. The "Tree" series moves away from the collective landscape of a forest to press up against the body of a single tree. In its deeply furrowed grain, the cycles of the seasons and the traces of weathering are layered one upon another. In "A Single Fruit," two birds fight over one berry even though the tree is hung with countless others. Between them, a single red fruit falls. The artist says it is a scene he saw in the front yard of his studio on Jeju.
"Sunflowers — Kursk" expresses both the tragedy of war and the possibility of recovery. Kursk, a fierce battleground in the war between Russia and Ukraine, was originally known for its sunflower fields. North Korean troops also fought there. Rather than depicting the horror directly, the work reveals the scars left by violence and the persistence of life through withered sunflowers. "Red Lantern Fish" shows the toughness of quietly carrying on with life even in barren conditions.
Born on Jeju and living there still, Kang Yo-bae has long painted the scenery of his home ground. He graduated from the College of Fine Arts at Seoul National University and its graduate school. He was a core member of the minjung art collective Reality and Utterance, and he belongs to the first generation of minjung artists, having put the history of the Jeju April 3 Incident onto canvas through his "History of the Jeju People's Uprising" series. The exhibition runs through the 12th.
