Past Exhibitions
Kim Hwan done the course of the Graduate School of Western Painting, Mokwon University and opened the first solo exhibition "Floating Landscape" (Gallery Wooyeon) in 2016. <Floating Landscape> is an exhibition in which the awareness of the artist about the visual perception is revealed, and asked what it is to paint through the correlation between painting, memory, and sight. In this ART LAB exhibition, the artist presents a picture of the thoughts of other minorities viewed from the standpoint of the social underprivileged. These two topics seem to be unrelated at first glance, but they are contextualized in that they deal with the visual and social networks surrounding 'me', such as the perception of the object, the relationship with the object, and my perception through the other.
Painting is the work of imagining the relationship of the painter to the object through eyes and mind. This also applies to photographs. Painting also reveals the movement of memories and emotions added to the perspective of the viewer. Kim Hwan's paintings have distinct expressive colors because they draw memories and experiences attached to objects they have seen. The object does not simply exist in the world, but enters the artist's body and passes through the prism of memory & experience and rests on the canvas. At this time, the picture is not simply an imitation of things, but a vessel for the artist's perception of things. The painting changes not to the realistic landscape but to the artist's mind landscape, that is, to a speculative or expressive image. On the other hand, the inquiry into social relations may be a phenomenological interest in the subject and another cognitive function in another dimension. A writer living with a natural disability tries to work as a mirror to look at his experiences through the relationship with the social weak people he met, such as homosexuals, and the differences between the various groups they belong to. To him, painting becomes a medium that illuminates social minorities, and a mirror that identifies and locates his identity. A closer look at how these concepts are visualized is one way to appreciate Kim's paintings.
Pure vision and social minority eyes. Perhaps this is the keyword that best describes the artist's art. What they have in common is how things or others come to themselves and create meaning. Whether the object is an idea (abstraction) or a landscape (landscape painting), painting is a task related to the object. I think the artist's drawing is the work of putting the world around him and the chess. Kim's paintings reveal a number of questions about what painting is, how it is imaged, how a picture can exist in a social context, and how it can be relativized through the painting.
