Hyunwook Ryu

I am an incomplete human being. Life trembles, the world is unstable, and existence is always precarious. My painting begins there — inside that precariousness.
"So let there be light, 그러니 거기에 빛이 비추게 하시기를" — a line from Lana Del Rey's God Knows I Tried — was a private memory buried in the trivial and the forgotten before it became the proposition for a series of paintings of light and flowers. To summon something from within memory: I recognized this as the way I paint now.
The series tentatively titled Memories departs from the intensely personal and the minor catastrophe. The wounds of life, love and exaltation, loss, emptiness, and release. I throw these memories onto the surface. In painting, projection (投射) means throwing without reason — through the act of throwing and being thrown, memory and event are made into painting, and meaning is found, constructed, afterward. The inner festering must be drawn outward. Personal unhappiness, passing through the point at which it is converted into painting, acquires form and orients itself toward lightness and luminosity.
To paint eros is proof that I am dying, and a symptom and passage of being alive. The image departs from the form of the body, separates into line, and abstracts. Figu...

B.F.A Yeungnam University
M.F.A Yeungnam University

Solo Exhibition
2016 'The Mourning Forest', Gallery Bundo , Daegu,
Korea
2013 miscellaneous □ Memory and Being / LEEAHN
GALLERY, Seoul, Korea
2011 Light 2011 Ha jung-woong Young Artists
Invitation Exhibition / Gwangju Museum of Art,
Gwangju, Korea
2009 Painting / Pohang, korea
2008 LEEAHN GALLERY / Daegu, Korea
2006 R/Reduction / Ssamzie Market Gallery, Daegu,
Korea
2005 Space 129 / Daegu, Korea
2005 Hankeesook Gallery / Daegu, Korea
1998 Yeungnam University / Daegu, Korea

Selected Group Exhibition
2018 'Abstract Thought', Gallery Center City,
Cheonan, Korea
2017 'Every Breath You Take', Suchang Youth
Mansion, Daegu, Korea
2016 'ART LAB', Shinsegae, Seoul, Korea
2015 'Fly to me', Daegu Art Factory, Daegu, Korea
2014 'Super Romantics', Daegu Art Factory, Korea
2012 'The Power', Hankeesook Gallery, Daegu,
Korea
2011 Looking back 2010 / LEEAHN GALLERY,
Changwon, Korea
2010 my story / gallery silla, Daegu, Korea
2010 art-road 77 / art factory, heiri, Korea
2009 Garden of desire / KT&G, Daegu, Korea
2008 Love Love / Ssamzie...