[2/3] Recent Paintings of Oh Won-Bae (2007)
October 21st, 2007 Posted in Recent Article(2007)Recent Paintings of Oh Won-Bae
–Existential Variations on Life Situation–
Young Mok Chung
(Professor, Seoul National University, Art History)
I.
Oh Won-Bae holds the second one-man exhibition after winning the Lee Joong-Seop award. It’s been almost 20 years since I got interested in his works. His works attracted me because of these three reasons. First, he and I are in the same age bracket with the similar growth backgrounds. Second, The tendency for Expressionistic art arouse my sympathy with his style as expressive as Francis Bacon in the place of France, the nation not friendly about German Expressionism. Third, I like the attitude of the artist who persists in his Expressionistic style based on figuration though that kind of trend is sterile in our art world.
II.
At this time, the fundamental structure of his painting is as same as the past works. His basic structure that disposes the figures on the front and sets the background with the cubic-like materials forming the ‘aura’ of the figures still constitutes the picture. Simultaneously the background still seems to play as a subject role, ironically converting the established relational structure of the main figure and the minor background. This whole pattern has been maintained constantly from the past work.
But his “in-depth symbolic structure” is changed. The aspects are like this:
1) Signifier related to music(figure+musical instrument) and flowers rise extensively.
2) The structural matter of the background is simplified or left out for 1).
3) The configuration of the figure is intensified, while the distortion of the perspective is increased.
4) In case of a small piece, the picture was painted on the cover of an old book.
5) First showing of his fresco works which are truly based on the traditional method.
These variations suggest the fact that his internal symbolic system has changed. How does it changed? Let’s find out by linking with the past works. First of all, this is not the first time that we can see the figures playing the music instruments in his painting. We could see the blue figures like ghosts playing the music in the cement construction of the gray city and we could imagine the sound they may make just like the gloomy mood of the painting. But now they look like a high school student band masters of the 1960’s whose playing seem to celebrate something just like rejoicing the removal of Chunggyecheon overpass. Their images, like short-haired teenage students fascinated with their music under the simple cubic structure or in the empty space of the birds eye view, remind us <The Dance> and <The Music> of Matisse. But these signifiers touch our hearts in a different way from them. Though we don’t know what they are playing, if their music itself is a symbol, that music is more positive, warm and active than the past.
In the descriptive aspect, the pictorial principle of his painting became more simple. The past complicated formative matters devised for the content or subject matter eliminated from the picture. He transformed his descriptive principle by simplifying the ground for intensifying the figuration. He removed entangled maze-like structures reflecting the gloominess of the city and the absurdity of the existence in a broad sense and excluded
the cracked and heavy surface of the picture. Then he imported the blank daringly into the screen with the confidence in the form and controlled the figurative intensity by simple geometrical form. This tendency is more modified in his fresco works. The distortion of linear perspective on architecture like an early cubic landscape of Braque, or the fresco of Villa of Mysteries at Boscoreale creates more feelings of the mystic space like de Chirico.
What about the look of human figure? The mask-like man in 1970’s changed to a beast in 1980’s and that man became a ghost wandering in the gloomy city. Now then, we can meet the very realistic human figure for the first time in his painting. Is there any meaning in this change? Why did the artist spend 30 years to draw the realistic human figure and what was his difficulty in it? Although there is some clues I can infer as the answer to this question, it is his problem solved by the artist himself. However I can say that this is not the result from the general obsession of the artists who must change his style in continuance. That is, the importance is not in the fact that how much the human figure changed figuratively and realistically but in the issue that how it became something implicit or a certain symbol to function autonomously in the entire structure of the picture.
III.
When we read his intention to change his human figure as one of “in-depth symbolic structure”, we can infer these biographical clues. He is a Buddhist and he became old. Although these facts are too private, we need to bear them mind to understand his works. When we think how much philosophical approach to Buddhism affect the Existentialism and how he changed his way to confront the world from struggling with the absurdity and nihility to harmonizing and forgiving with compassion, we can see that the change of work means the change of the artist.
In conclusion, if he is a true expressionist, the essence of this change will be his intellectual attitude to face the world as an artist. To the expressionists, the intellect means not the stagnate condition reached by accumulating the knowledge or made by inborn superiority but the progressive will itself waken up always between the innate and the outer world. The reason his paintings always contain the historical mind and social reality is the result of this intellectual attitude. The pictorial principle of his painting has been changed, but his intellectual attitude is same as before.