Huh Sooyoung Solo Exhibition at Hakgojae until November 19
Materials Expanded from Flowers and Grass to Gardens and the Universe
Labor-Intensive Work Layered One by One on Canvas
[Asia Economy Reporter Kim Heeyoon] “I choose subjects that I can draw a lot, layer repeatedly, and draw for a long time.”
Just as historians in the Joseon Dynasty recorded annals, artist Heo Sooyoung observes the four seasons of flowers and grass, the birth and death of life on canvas, and records them through layering and repetition. His records accumulate as laborious time, remaining as the material’s existence and accumulated time.
Heo Sooyoung’s solo exhibition is held at Hakgojae in Samcheong-dong, Jongno-gu, Seoul, until November 19. This exhibition features 23 paintings by the artist, including recent works from 2022.
The artist, who captures the overlapping nature of time in his paintings, says he engages in labor-intensive work by finding subjects in daily life and layering them one by one on the canvas. He combined natural materials found in gardens with various images of the universe to depict his own universe that does not exist in reality on the canvas.
Simply describing his work as “labor-intensive” hardly captures the difficulty of the process. The artist calmly explains his working method: “I paint until I am satisfied. When I painted a pictorial book, I painted until the last page, and when I painted the seasons, I decided to finish only when winter came.” He added, “Even when I thought I couldn’t paint anymore, later I wanted to paint more when I looked at it again.”
The work “Fungi,” introduced in this exhibition, is a large piece measuring 390 cm wide and 162 cm high, in which he painted all the mushrooms listed in a mushroom pictorial book. Completed in 2010, the artist broke his principle of “not touching a finished painting” by overpainting butterflies and insects, creating a new landscape. The densely packed scene of mushrooms and insects offers the audience a universe beyond nature.
Heo has captured the landscapes around his living spaces?flowers, grass, sea, and forest?on canvas. While he has worked on accumulating the changes in nature over a year, he focused on the universe, which compresses longer and deeper time. By overlapping and arranging stars and the cosmos to depict a non-existent universe, he introduced his work by saying, “I painted until the universe became a painting.”
The artist’s daily practice of layering his gaze and records with a brush on the canvas evokes the path of a seeker beyond painting. When asked if the repetitive work is difficult, he countered, “Isn’t it hard for everyone, office workers and all who work?” He defined a painter as “someone who discovers rather than depicts the world.” The seeker’s path of the painter who discovers and records nature and the universe continues in the present tense today.
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