The Painting World of Seunghee Hur, The Existential Self-Portrait

Art is autobiographical. Pearl is the oyster's autobiography. Even if I set out to make a film about a fillet of sole, it would be about me.

- Federico Fellini

The main character of the Patrick Suskind's short story titled ‘Depth Wish’ from “Three Stories and A Reflection (Drei Geschichten und Eine Betrachtung)” is a young, talented and passionate woman painter. One day she hears from a critic at a party that her work lacks in depth. From that day on, she is desperate to find the depth in her painting, but becomes suicidal in the end. Truly obscure rhetoric of criticism. In fact what has criticism done for creativity? Strictly speaking, art criticism belongs to literature. How can the language of literature fully translate the intuition of art? How can the uncertain tool of language explain the vague and heavy reality of art? Reality is fundamentally the world of intuitive discernment unable to be represented in letters………... A multitude of intemperate language and backbiting attacks by French critics at the Impressionism; the self-righteous knife wielded by Greenberg at American art; the one-eye-closed criticisms made by Korean art critics of monochrome painting ? as such, the stature of criticism has counted for nothing in the history of art in comparison with its colorful rhetoric.. What can criticism do indeed? Criticism can never be the forefront of creativity. It can do nothing but clarify the past practices. It is ironic that I, as an artist having such a viewpoint on criticism, write an article about another’s work. Why did Patrick Suskind’s novel first strike me when talking about Seunghee Hur’s painting? A glance at the painting journey of Seunghee Hur shows that, like other painters, she has also tried various formal experiments in her study period to establish her own style like other painters. For a painter to have her own style means that she stands alone as a painter. Those experiments can be analyzed and summarized in the following aspects: 1. Decorative trend of Vienna Secession 2. Simplicity of arts like Kim Whanki’s 2. Paint layers of abstract expressionism 3. Attachment of objects as tried by Julian Schnabel 4. Impasto and scrubbing as tried by Gerhard Richter In other words, she is considered to stand closer to the Romantic School putting richer colors and rough Matiere above strict form, intuition above logic, and immersion above contemplation. However, looking at her recent work shows that, unlike before, she stands in front of the canvas with a more sober attitude. She mostly uses one dominant color dryly, not thickly and with chroma low saturation. The picture composition is static, texture is smooth, and also form is very simple. In other words, I cannot but feel that she turns from Baroque passions to classical purification. This may mean that she has grown more as an artist. I also think that it shows her life and her true character. The themes of the work she submitted for this exhibition are mainly characters. The characters in her paintings are quite different from those in other figure paintings where they are magnificently situated in the center of the picture staring at the audience. Hers are not the main subject of the pictures, but hazy silhouettes shyly situated in corners of the canvas like parts of the background. All of them stand either with their back toward the audience or slightly sideways ? and in the hazy dawn fog too. The figures sink under the background layers of paint, deeply stained in the canvas texture and are very faint. So, in some paintings, we cannot even see at a glance that there are figures there. They are completely different from Richter’s figure paintings, which highlight the models, by intentionally painting rear views or deliberately erasing or smudging the already painted figures. Figure paintings of Seunghee Hur are also different from oriental paintings as margins and boundaries are not separated but harmonized together. The biggest feature of her figures is their anonymity and ambiguity. The figures are neither men nor women, neither boys nor old men, but just human. The artist who showed graphically the existence of universal human would be Giacometti. Like the Giacometti’s figures represented only with mysterious lines in space, the figures of Seunghee Hur are also immersed in the canvass and hidden in the background. Paradoxically, however, such anonymity actually shows the existence of humans more clearly. It is because the rear view of human does neither lie nor be made up. It hears whispering sounds in calm simplicity. They are the very sounds of existence coming from the bottom of unknown depth. They are just portraits of the artist herself. At any rate, I cannot always see all the present situations of ??post-modern art in a positive manner. A number of micro narratives generated in the name of pluralism in place of the grand narrative criticized as universalism. Post-modern art is the degenerative art, not only plainly displaying humble corners of our body and the world by refusing sublimation and purification but also making noises with excessive speculation or self-confession of exhibitionism. In the work of , Arthur Danto says that the freedom of post-modern art from the aesthetic performance to enter the realm of philosophy and narrative is the extension of new freedom and possibility. But, I cannot but doubt that it is another crisis capable of drifting by losing the anchor point and losing the identity. From this point of view, the rustic art pursued by the painter Seunghee Hur, that is, the art stemming from life and returning to life, the art making us reconsider effectiveness and accountability of art, is considered as an alternative capable of overcoming the negative aspects of the today's post-modern art. The paintings of Seunghee Hur give us a small hope of possibly reviving classical values by redefining forms through Apollonian contemplation and self-restraint. February 2014 Written by Sangil Oh Professor The Graduate School of Art Hongik University Seoul The Republic of Korea 2014/06/15