The perspective of Jo Young Han contemplating on the night cityscape

 

 

 

 

Kye Hoon Ha (Art critic/Dankook University Professor)

 

 

  The city, a landscape created by a dense congregation of people, is unnatural, artificial, or sometimes bleak and threatening compared to the non-metropolitan communities that evolve according to the order of nature. The city may also be referred to the din and bustle and speediness while being also seen to have double-aspect of convenience with abundance and raucous. The familiar tale of The Country Mouse and the City Mouse from our childhood demonstrates the sheer discrepancy in character of the city and the countryside. The tale's protagonists are the two mice of different origin, but their conceived identities, having been personalized, are played out to match the life of reader.

  What Jo Young Han is doing is primarily concerned with the accidental experience that the artist felt was personal, which was the dark cityscape that he expresses panoramically on the canvas. From the artist's personal point of view, formed initially in a small city where he spent his childhood and youth before entering college, he faced another phase of development as he introduced himself to a large metropolitan area where he felt strange and alienated. While the big city was to be an arena of opportunities and activities, his sentiments received a whole new bundle of impressions from the night view of the city like lack of individuality, intermittent feeling of exclusion, identity crisis, in other words, a sort of fright. These hallucinatory experiences allowed Jo Young Han, having lived inside the city, to envisage the whole landscape from a different angle. He in fact chose to observe it from outside so as to contemplate on the scene objectively and look at the mode of life in the city.

  One of the notable attributes of city is the prolonged period of activity enabled by artificial lightings. Whereas the majority of country sides will cease from daily activities with the sunset, the city will continue the dynamism with the help of manmade lights not so differently from daytime. The city is awake, fast-moving, consuming and clamoring even during the time for seeking repose.

  The city of such a sort would appear to us in different shape and form in the presence of manufactured illumination as its real facet is not seen from distance where the artist is postured. In this case though, the crucial means that enables us to cognize the city's landscape and characteristic is the emitted lights. As one envisages this particular look of the city, the dichotomized view of lights and the overspread darkness prevails in front of the eyes such that the formative elements both covers up and unveils things at night. This in effect gives us a new order and life of the hidden look of city, stimulating the viewer's imagination and memories.

  The panoramic view of Jo Young Han is the one from an approaching pilot's point of view or a high rooftop posture. Then such view of Han is depicted much like the view of opaque, pearly dawn on a horizon or pitch-darkness. The group of progressive glimmers become coordinates as we are attracted into the picture and are enabled to estimate the scale and shape of what is hidden behind the buildings and roads.

  The mode of artistic expression employed by Han is not just painting, but applying numerous pieces of stickers of bright colors. The careful composition by this application reveals the general landscape in which we semi-vaguely calculate the hidden shape of buildings and the associated strata of space, which in turn exposes the lines of roads and skylines. 

  And such manner of working requires a long streak of single-handed repetitive actions and concentration, via which Han creates a whole view of a city on canvas where our stories are told and recollected and our dreams are made. And Han's method demonstrates his long contemplation on deviating from traditional painting and expanded potential for expression. Besides having named this painting series of night cityscape Darkview, Han is also considering a major installation work involving junk materials to recompose the cityscape. The materials are to consist of cans, bottles and boxes as Han intends to bring in the abandoned articles of the city's consumption, indicating involvement of the concept of recycling. And through this mechanism, Han is willing to symbolize a context from the cycle of construction, destruction and reconstruction of a city.

  The recent attention on the general health and environment has established negative images of cities with terms like overpopulation, contamination, accidents and dramatic gaps in personal relationships. But it is also true that the creation and ideas related to cities have been respected for their tangible outcomes of development and creativity since the medieval era. Moreover, the wave of industrialization accelerated the process of expansion in company with the belief that urbanization is a desirable end. We can notice the energy, pride and desire in Ambrogio Lorenzetti's Sienna in the early Renaissance period, Vermeer's Delft landscape in the Baroque era, various scenes of Paris by the Impressionists, and the cityscape of the futurist Boccioni. In its extended context, we are now encountering the works of Jo Young Han with whom we breathe in the midst of the same surroundings that allows us to think about the meaning of the city.