Han Man-Young

According to Hal Foster, forms of modernism “admits the limits of media.” Paints and canvas, the tools of representation which once used for the three-dimensional description, reveal the property of matter in themselves, which make a new form of expression. In the 1910s when the waves of modernism were covering up the continent of europe, Marcel Duchamp, however, introduced a typical attitude of postmodernism in producing arts beyond the limits of modernism media and expression, raising questions about the system, institution, and history of art. The subject or title of his artwork often has nothing to do with the contents or what was expressed. A piece of art works as a code overcoming the semblance with an established icon and symbolic metaphor. He used various ways of expression such as punning, body art, performance, productions of public culture, advertisement, and even other arts. In the 1910s, Duchamp already showed synthetic, genre-over, category-over, time-over works freed from the boundary between modernism and postmodernism or the historical norms. Even today when the postmodernism has been dismantled, his influences are still found.

Reference, Modification, and Between the Two

When Han, Man Young was in his thirties, he made a work freed from the style of Korean formal modernism which, at that time, most of young artists tried to use. For the work, he referred to Da Vinci’s and transformed it into a new style. Even if Han had been known as an artist of Hyper Realism because of his elaborate representation, such a stylistic frame was not important for the artist. Han has partially referred to the works of famous artists like Leonardo Da Vinci, Vermeer, Brugel, Magritte, Kim Hongdo, Shin Yunbok, and Jung Seon.

Like Duchamp who raised questions about history and institution of art, Han has a great interest in the history of art. His use of the famous of art seems interesting. The works he chooses have nothing to do with their original purposes, values, meanings, or themes. They are used as independent codes existing in Han’s own time. Each functions as a code freed from its original context and sitting on a new one.

Like this, the famous works of art that Han used function as independent and empty signs. However, the emptiness becomes the place of producing every meaning and message. Han tries not to insert any message from his side, however, the audiences have a chance to pile up the complicated experiences of memory and emotion on the space casting reflections of themselves on it.

Han’s use of other arts is different from Duchamp’s use of classical works or objects. This is because Han strictly destroys original meanings and separates the works from their expected signifies. Han borrows a certain time from the past, but it leaving its specificity behind. Therefore, his works overcome the limits of certain trend of thought, time, and convention. The arts transformed into new things in Han’s work, the traces of artists of the past, occupy the undecided spaces between the boundaries. The visualization of the undecided spaces makes his works more meaningful and completes artist’s own time freed from any trends or currents of the period. Therefore, Han, Man Young’s shows a combined space which unites yesterday and today, original and copy, form and content.

boxes as Joseph Cornell did, figurative motif, and fragmented mixture in Han’s works.

However, we can see from the present exhibition that Han is presenting his consistent concept in a poetic way. He has constantly been pursuing to work on the relations between the formative elements of the painting and real things, which is intensified in his recent works. For example, in a large sized work which uses Jeong Son’s Kumgang-san do (*a painting of Mt. Kumgang), Han painted the background with tone down colors rather than garish colors and then painted the forms using similar colors. The forms expressed only with lines do not have visually prominent effects. They rather eat into the background and refuse to show clearly themselves, which reverses the conventional relationship between the forms and ground. Sinking into the background and rising again to the surface, they include the endless circulation of time. Moreover, because of the small and minute movement of the fine lines in the lower parts of the canvas, we cannot tell the forms from illusions. This challenges to the eyesight of audiences.

The Memory and Reproduction of Time

Han’s refusal on the determined roles and relations of figurative elements has to do with what Matisse, Han’s favorite artist, shows in (1906). In the work, lines become colors and spaces, which denies the convention of production contrasting the drawing with coloring and the consecutive order of line and colors. Perhaps, this is why we can see many Matisse’s collages in this exhibition. The displaced and fragmented images painted in bright colors are endlessly vibrating between the original and the present. The collage borrowing Lichtenstein’s work using the ‘fresh’ subject of animation and vivid colors feels different because of the representational elements drawn with lines. The artist places the icon of pop culture inside an independent environment. Here, the ‘figurative-ness’ of modernism collides with the ‘everyday life-ness’ of postmodernism.
Artist Han, Man Young has always been sincere and frank to his works for over 30 years. He has never spoken of his works with a strong voice. When he used figurative elements, combined the two-dimensional and three-dimensional, and created new signs using transformation, his intention to extend the range of audiences’ perception was quietly revealed. He wants to open everything rather than decide it. He always tries to distance himself from his works so that the lines he draws could include various forms and contents and that the combination of hybrid objects would not make a specific ‘thing.’ The distance leaves a space for him, which becomes his work itself. When this sight spread to the audiences, the experience is finally reproduced.