PowerKorea | New Year Special: “I Hope You Feel Plenty of Hanbok Charm in ‘Korean Painting’ This Year of the Dragon(龍)!” — Issue No. 126

"I hope you feel plenty of the hanbok charm in 'Korean painting,' you guys(龍)!"

Spreading the popularization of Korean painting on social media, wielding influence as a 'star artist of Korean painting'

Written by Hong Ki-in, Reporter

In an art world that prizes seniority and career length, artist Kim Hyun Jung has taken a leading role as the 'idol of Korean painting,' actively spreading the pop appeal of Korean painting on social media and popularizing it among the general public. Communicating with some 300,000 followers on social media, she continues to receive great affection, and is recognized for an art-historical contribution: bringing pure art into collaboration with everyday life and industry, expanding the boundaries of Korean painting in the process. She has held 23 solo exhibitions under the theme 'Naesoong,' and her exhibited paintings have sold out entirely on several occasions, drawing considerable attention. Her fresh ideas, subject matter and expressive technique have earned her a reputation as 'audacious,' and she is seen as a rising star of the Korean painting world for attempting change while grounding her work in the theory and technique of traditional Oriental painting. Each solo exhibition has made headlines, and she is the only figure from the art world to be named both to Dong-A Ilbo's '100 People Who Will Shine Korea in 10 Years' and Forbes' '30 Under 30 Asia.'

'Naesoong Story': collaging hanbok and hanji to capture unguarded everyday life

Korean painter Kim Hyun Jung is an artist who, drawn to the elegance and secretiveness that hanbok conveys, portrays everyday, unguarded moments through 'Naesoong Story' — figures in hanbok caught behaving without formality. Hanji collage is the defining feature of 'Naesoong Story.' Onto a body painted in ink-wash and light color, she attaches hand-dyed hanji so that the silhouette shows through, completing the work in a way reminiscent of playing with dolls. The wide skirt of the hanbok is a secretive, cosmos-like space with infinite room for imagination. Ink made from the ash left after everything has burned away becomes fitting material for rendering that skirt in the color of the universe. Looking at the resulting body of work, one can't help but let out an unconscious laugh of recognition. "Since my work is essentially self-portraiture, I draw inspiration from the moments of everyday life I actually live. I think the pieces that spring suddenly from daily life and experience, and that are completed into a more universal idea, tend to receive more love from people." According to Kim, her method is to look with a more sensitive eye at things everyone else would simply pass by, and to connect that to her work. "In fact, I think life isn't so much a series of grand events as it is layers of daily routine that pile up to create interesting phenomena. My work started from the problem of 'gaze' and 'convention' — and 'gaze' in particular was an uncomfortable subject that occupies far too large a place in our society. It has become a world where the 'me' that is shaped by consciousness of what's around me matters more than the actual, important me. As I projected these dishonest appearances into my work, various subjects began to reveal themselves." For Kim, hanbok became a medium through which she could more effectively convey the theme of 'naesoong' (a Korean word for putting on airs, or feigned decorum) — revealing the phenomenon of someone dressed in elegant, formal clothing while engaging in common, everyday behavior, that is, the contrast between costume and conduct. Painting the figure in the nude and then rendering it so that the body shows through via collage (for the jeogori, the hanbok top) or ink-wash coloring (for the skirt) is, in the end, no different from guiding the viewer's own insight that with naesoong, 'you can see right through it.'

Record-setting solo-exhibition attendance, rise to an influential artist

Artist Kim Hyun Jung currently communicates with some 300,000 social-media followers, introducing Korean painting to the public in an approachable way, and pursuing 'social drawing' — two-way communication with the public around ideas and the working process. She has a history of selling out all 13 pieces in her debut invitational solo exhibition, 'Naesoong Story,' within two days in 2013. This was followed by her 2014 solo exhibition 'Naesoong Olympics' at Gana Insa Art Center in Insa-dong, which drew 23,887 visitors over 12 days, and her 2016 solo exhibition 'Naesoong Amusement Park,' which set a record of 67,402 visitors over 27 days. She has since moved on to work under the theme "A Dozen Eggs, an Age to Marry." "The reason so many people came to my solo exhibitions from the very first one, right after I'd just graduated from university, was that a netizen first posted a picture of the work to an online community, and it started gaining attention that way." Having directly experienced the power of social networks since then, Kim Hyun Jung has continued her practice by steadily running accounts introducing her paintings, and communication on social media has become an important part of her daily life. Hoping to be remembered for art that is "not difficult and fun" for the general public, she stays busy with her work while still trying to share stories about her pieces with as many people as possible, and to show her own story through social media and her blog. "I think everything from receiving inspiration to the stage of interpretation falls within the category of art in contemporary art, and social media has now become part of my practice. In fact, while a blog does limit two-way conversation, it has helped me a great deal in objectifying myself and getting the chance to look back from the other person's perspective, keeping me from growing exhausted or falling into loneliness." For Kim, communicating on social media means more than simply organizing her own thoughts more clearly — it also feels, to her, like receiving critique lessons from the public. She also considers herself to have opened up a genre she calls 'social drawing.' 'Social drawing,' which makes use of social networks, becomes a venue where the public and the artist discuss and even complete a single drawing (painting) together — perhaps a true forum for participatory art. She hopes it can also offer everyone the experience of having a share in a single work.

The idol of Korean painting, Kim Hyun Jung

Completed doctoral coursework in Fine Arts, Graduate School of Seoul National University

B.A. and M.A. in Oriental Painting, College of Fine Arts, Seoul National University

B.A. in Business Administration, College of Business Administration, Seoul National University

Graduate of the Fine Arts Department, Sunhwa Arts Middle and High School

<Exhibitions>

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA | U.S. Capitol, Washington D.C., USA | National Assembly of the Republic of Korea | Seoul Metropolitan Council | Beijing Biennale | Seoul Arts Center | National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, and more

<Awards and Activities>

Forbes Asia '30 Under 30'

Dong-A Ilbo's '100 People Who Will Shine Korea in 10 Years'

Bunjung Culture Award, Talent Support Award

EBS <Haeyo and Haeyo>, 'Sister Daenggi'

Seoul Metropolitan Government Publicity Ambassador, Hope Bridge Publicity Ambassador

<Works Featured In>

8 different high school art textbooks | high school art theory textbook

elementary school art textbooks | middle school art textbooks, and more

Drawing attention as a star artist in the arts field, recognized for her art-historical contribution

Artist Kim Hyun Jung dreams of a society where art breathes and lives within people's everyday lives. She is currently gaining recognition as a uniquely prominent star artist in the arts field while both teaching theory and practice to university majors and giving a range of engaging lectures on diverse topics to non-majors. She is also recognized for her art-historical contribution of expanding the territory of pure art through various collaborations with industry. At an event praying for the passage of the U.S. Congress's resolution (H. Res. 1245) designating Kimchi Day (November 22 each year), she held an exhibition portraying, in Korean painting, a scene of making kimchi while wearing hanbok, working to introduce Korean culture to the world. She has also continued donating and volunteering steadily since beginning her career as an artist in 2012, engaging in a great deal of activity beyond art itself. Her selection for the <Talent Support Award> at the first Bunjung Culture Awards, held in December last year [2023], stems from this record of achievement. These days, she is working under the three keywords 'masterpiece parody,' 'marriage' and 'hanbok' to express Korea's own distinctive culture. While she generally works with Korean-painting materials, she also experiments through a variety of materials and techniques including oil painting, 3D printing, paper-cutting art, iPad drawing, video and installation. In keeping with the untact era, she has also been sharing her working process on YouTube. Artist Kim Hyun Jung stated, "I hope that Naesoong and the rest of my genre come to be widely enjoyed, and that I'm remembered as a painter who knows how to refine new territory with her own color, leading the globalization of Korean painting." She added, "I'd like to say: please look at a lot of Korean painting. Simply enjoying the visual charm or emotional flavor that Korean painting offers is more than enough, but you'll find it far more interesting once you know the characteristics of its history, technique and materials," and, ever thoughtful, added a helpful tip: "For example, if you know the basic principle of appreciation for Korean and Oriental painting — that the eye moves from the upper right to the lower left — the enjoyment and charm will multiply many times over."

[Works featured: The Twelve Zodiac Animals: Dragon, 2023, ink and light color with collage on hanji, 153×90cm / Naesoong: New Year's Resolution (feat. From Tomorrow), 2016, ink and light color with collage on hanji, 130×163cm / Marriage: World's Apart, 2019, ink and light color with collage on hanji, 199×428cm / Marriage: Welcome to Si-World, 2019, ink and light color with collage on hanji, 87×69.5cm / Living for Appearances: A Housewife's 9th-Degree Spring Day, 2013, ink and light color with collage on hanji, 191×130cm / Naesoong: Utopia, 2013, ink and light color with collage on hanji, 96×130cm / Shall We Dance?, 2014, ink and light color with collage on hanji, 2840×5060cm]

Written by — Reporter Hong Gi-in