Dong-A Ilbo | A 21st-Century Genre Painting Draws Laughter with the ‘Hanbok Naesoong Girl’
In 2013, Dong-A Ilbo introduced the 'Naesoong' series by then 25-year-old rookie artist Kim Hyun Jung, who graduated second in her class from Seoul National University's Department of Oriental Painting. The paper reported that her work 'Acha (我差),' depicting a woman in hanbok eating ramyeon while eyeing a luxury handbag and Starbucks coffee, went viral on social media, and that all 13 of her works sold out within two days at a joint exhibition at the Seoul Arts Center.
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In the 'Oriental painting,' a young woman dressed neatly in red hanbok sits on the floor eating instant ramyeon from a pot. As she uses her chopsticks, her gaze is fixed on a Louis Vuitton handbag and a Starbucks coffee off to one side of the room.
This work, ironically pairing 'cheap ramyeon' with 'expensive luxury goods,' has gone viral, garnering some 42,000 likes on a humor page on the social networking service (SNS) Facebook.
The piece is regarded as a satirical portrait of a certain vain segment of Korean women (colloquially dubbed 'kimchi-nyeo'). Netizens sympathized with it, saying it humorously captures the distorted desire of some women to scrimp on food, even eating ramyeon, in order to crave luxury goods and expensive coffee.
As male sympathy for the piece spread, some women reacted with displeasure. One woman, surnamed Yeom, pushed back, saying, "Don't lump all Korean women together and curse at us as if the whole of Korean womanhood were 'kimchi-nyeo,' just based on some women." The humor page that shared the painting drew roughly 800 comments as men and women debated back and forth.
The artist behind the controversial work 'Acha (我差)' is Kim Hyun Jung (25, female), who graduated second in her class from Seoul National University's Department of Oriental Painting last year. Meeting a Dong-A Ilbo reporter on the 10th at the Seoul Arts Center in Seocho-dong, Seocho-gu, Seoul, artist Kim said, "I used the title's characters — 我 ('self') and 差 ('lacking/off') — to express a facet of contemporary people who appear perfect on the outside but are lacking within. By depicting a figure doing the least dignified things while wearing hanbok, the most dignified of garments, I wanted to humorously express the duality of human beings."
The woman in hanbok in the painting is Kim herself. "During my college years, I saw people who praised you to your face and cursed you behind your back, and I wanted to express that hypocrisy through painting. But then I realized I had that side to me too, and so I came to paint myself as the model," she said with a laugh.
Artist Kim has mainly painted humorous scenes: a woman elegantly dressed in hanbok eating McDonald's fries using two straws as chopsticks, or a woman laden with shopping bags flustered as her shoe slips off, and so on. She explained that she first paints the woman in the piece nude, then applies hanji (traditional Korean paper) and other materials to render the hanbok through a collage technique, wanting to express a form of naesoong in which the woman's bare skin can be glimpsed right through.
Artist Kim opened a personal corner titled 'Kim Hyun Jung's Naesoong Series' within Part 1 of 'The Day Section Chief Kim Goes to the Exhibition Hall,' a joint exhibition by 68 artists held June 6–13 at the Seoul Arts Center, and set a record by completely selling out all 13 of her own works within just two days. The works were priced between 400,000 and 2.5 million won each. In an art world that tends to prize seniority, a complete sell-out by a 25-year-old female Korean-painting artist is an unusual occurrence.