The Land of Life – Yellow Mud / Movement in unity of East and Western

paintings

Korean artist / Park, Byung-Joon

As time flows on, it has been approved by the results, the age seems to bring about a diversity in senses which leads to an improvement of our inner souls.

 It becomes the main root of creation that changes the reality based on the past and creates the future-oriented based on the reality and promotes the greater change of awareness.

The new terms of sociology, science, culture and art makes one wonder whether it is science or human that creates art, the rapid rate of change in every field makes it what is art nearly indistinguishable.

Through the visual phenomenon, the change of the psychological mindedness gave rise to a new thought and awareness. In this reality, if one keeps on asserting tradition, a new fresh creative art will no longer appear and art itself will become obsolete.

A new materials, a new way of expression and a continuous studies on tradition and a revolution based on tradition will be needed to break the rigid dogma of the past.

During the training, I liked and enjoyed drawing the daily materials like magnificent mountains, cliffs, colorful flowers.

The materials are also traditional and general, and I have come to understand the characteristics of each material and how to use them. I have used the cold and calm blue paints rather than the warm red ones.

However, through the passage of time, and the curriculum of the disciples, In transition to the Age of various colors, the visual experiences led to the change of thought and behavior in awareness. For these various reasons, it has brought a change in choosing the progressive materials, and in the process, I came to meet the unique characteristic of yellow mud.

Yellow mud is a mother of all life! It is like the fertile ground that has the nutrients which support the various kinds of plants such as corn, rice and barley and also animals can stay alive with it. Eventually, they all return back to earth.

80% ~ 90% of earth is made of yellow mud, which seems like the young soil in its vital and youthful period. Plants and animals grown in the earth are also useful for various diseases. For example, when caught a cold in the old days, people used to wrap Korean pears in the newspapers, pile them up with yellow mud and bury them in a bonfire all night. The cold would go away when drinking the water of them.

Nowadays, there are yellow mud rooms, so called Hwangtou-bang, and apartments made of yellow mud, which is one step further result based on the experiences and records of our ancestors. Yellow mud fulfills the hopes and desires of all mankind and changes the sorrow and disappointment into the pleasure and hopes.

The life on yellow mud, there are people talking and sharing the warmth, affection and sufferings, engaging with their studies and philosophies, in the pictures of a life in harmony with nature, it seems to have no change in the old times, nowadays, and even in the harsh and heartless realities.

In our Korean paintings, we use perpendicular smears and spreads as a parallel exorting form, while artists in western choose to use spreading the pigments on the screen.

Smears, spreads, and exorting forms are the negative characters, spreading the pigments on the screen is the positive one.

These are simple characteristics of our people that fulfilled the sympathy and spiritual needs of ins and outs by performing the concept of positivity and negativity! That is a painting.

If one look closer to the spreading of parallel into the osmotic phenomenon and perpendicular spreading which is permeated into capillary phenomenon. In Western painting, they use parallel forms on the screen, but our Korean painting embraces both parallel and perpendicular forms, and has created our unique and particular cultural style.

On the basis of these traditional painting styles, to correspond with our national spirits and to discover our modern unique paintings, we are constantly researching and experimenting the research, creativity, probity, revival of yellow mud, which possesses the sentimental and gentle characteristics, in harmony of the lacquer and osmotic techniques mentioned before.

Western and oriental paintings has tried to introduce earth into paintings, but seen from the paintings and other works from the past, there was no surprisingly creative art work because the inner world of an artist and the characteristic of materials were unable to connect.

For nearly 20 years of studying (considering the artistic values and novelty when used as a link to paintings) and creative experiments on yellow mud. Considering how to find a better way to correspond paintings that fits our national spirit rather than just oriental.

It needs to look deeper in various ways to assimilate into our sentiments in harmony of our traditional paintings on Dakjongi which can contain the substances of ink and its features, and the westernized technique that includes drawing lines and spreading.

I choose a simple and gently yellowish brown mud as a coloring material and create a new genre by objectifying my own ideals and beliefs(Quaternity) flowing in my inner world.

I have been working consistently on how to create inspired and refreshing work that can stand up to Korean art history, but I set aside my worries about the results, and make steady and persistent effort, hoping for a better result someday.