Galaxy Painting

https://youtu.be/UfGQZJQ3xe4 su6255.tistory.com Kim Mansu & Rosalie Fabre in Conversation RF: Rosalie Fabre Kim: Kim Mansu RF: Your paintings appear to me like amalgams of vivid memories. It is almost as if you rendered the past alive again, throu your own reinterpretation of art historical references. What importance do your personal as well as national histories play in your paintings? KIM: I’'ve lived as an artist for 40 years with so many artistic thoughts and struggles in mind. It’'s been about 25 years since I decided not to pursue paintings derived from Western culture. only about 30 years ago, Korea was still an unrecognized country in the world. During that time (I guess many other artists may have once been concerned with a similar issue), art in Korea or Korean art was a total stranger to people in the international art scene. And that made me consider an artistic path that dug more into traditional values of Korean art while balancing out a sense of contemporary art in the world. That’'s the main reason I quit western oil painting 25 years ago. After I changed my direction toward more traditional methods of landscape painting, I happened to participate in a group exhibition held at the gallery space in Hyundai Department Store, which was a very well-known art space at the time, and realized that even my own people, Koreans, didn’'t even give recognition to our own value. I tried to figure out why and gave lots of thought to finding an easier way to approach the public with my artistic practice without losing Korean traditional value. These thoughts drove me to arrive at Min Hwa (a type of folk painting), which was a long standing art genre in Korea geared more toward a public audience. Now in 2018, Min Hwa is not unfamiliar, but back then it was a strange and unfamiliar type of painting. People hadn’'t been recognizing its existence, although it had always been there for a long time. When thinking about Korean painting, people can easily think only about landscape ink painting, but I wanted to talk about this beautiful colorful traditional painting to people rather than the black and white literati ones. To foreigners, Korean art would be positioned somewhere between Chinese art and Japanese art. However, Korean art definitely embodies its own aesthetical uniqueness derived from geological and ethnical characteristics. You may then ask what makes Korean’'s aesthetic uniqueness so different from others.