Jong-Kwang Hyun Solo Exhibition

     I am painting objects and landscape seen in photographs: a classic Coca-Cola bottle and cap circa 1930s to 1960s, an old-fashioned toy soldier manufactured in a factory, as well as North Korean troops on parade. Gazing at the photographs, I recall the memories of my childhood and complicated circumstances in South Korea, a time reflected in my paintings. I am striving to reconstitute Warhol’s iconic pop image and creations to my personal reference to be romanticized. My artistic intention is not to reproduce photographs exactly, but rather to represent the afterimage in the loss of substantiality through the sublime and the human being. The basic painting framework is a square grid on a square canvas. A grid borrowed from modernity allows me to meditate on my own method of painting by repetition while practicing the mechanical approach to painting related to alternative ways and processes, encompassed in abstract and figurative works.

     Jong-Kwang Hyun (b.1971, South Korea) is now working at Seoul, South Korea. He was a recipient of SCAD honors grad scholarship, received an M.F.A. degree in painting from Savannah College of Art and Design in 2017 after having received an M.F.A. degree from the graduate school and a B.F.A. at Hongik University in Seoul. He has exhibited his works in solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally including galleries and museums in Seoul, Pusan, Gwangju, Beijing, Ningbo, Shanghai, Tokyo, Fukuoka, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Sydney and Sarajevo. He won an award of excellent prize in Grand Art Exhibition of Korea at National Museum of Contemporary Art in 2002 and an award of special prize in DANYA International Art Festival in 2007. Currently, Hyun is researching on grid painting for his Ph.D. dissertation at Hongik University, where he had completed the doctoral program in fine art from 2003 until 2006.