FEATURE
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Artist Han Heewon in his art museum.
People in the Arts: Han Heewon Interview by Jennis Kang
www.gwangjunewsgic.com
November 2020
To enter my drawing room, I pass through four doors: the door to the dark stairs, the iron door to the hall, the door to my room, And the studio door. When I paint, I close all the doors. Sometimes I think no one would even know if I were to die within these four doors. (From The Diary of Living Alone)
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his is a poem by Han Heewon, an artist living in Gwangju’s Yangnim-dong. I went to visit his private art museum one rainy day. The public library was closed due to COVID-19, and his art gallery was also closed. If you follow the alleyway past the Lee Jang-woo House, an old hanok in Yangnim-dong, you will find Han Heewon’s art museum. Yangnim-dong remains a quiet, old sight. When I arrived in front of the museum, the entrance caught my eye. The gate was made of old, metal scaffolding flooring such as that once used when constructing buildings.
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In the 1960s and 1970s, it was difficult to build many needed bridges, so people erected wooden scaffolding to serve as bridges, such as the one across the upper reaches of the Gwangju Stream. This Ppong-ppong Bridge (뽕뽕다리) did not have a solid bottom to walk on. When I was young, I remember crossing the shaky bridge with my hand firmly in my mother’s. I was probably about three or four years old at the time, and I still remember seeing the water below through the large holes built into the metal flooring in the scaffolding that I was gingerly walking on. This still remains as a fear of mine. Han Heewon related to me that he built his museum gate with flooring for scaffolding to retain memories of the old Gwangju Stream, and he told me a great deal more in my interview with him. Jennis Kang: Your paintings are like poetry. I feel the wind blowing over the blurred boundaries in your paintings. Refined grief. I wonder where that sadness came from. People say that the lives they live are with the character formed in their childhood, so I wonder what your childhood was like. Han Heewon: Musicians make music using the same notes, but we can discern that some music is Tchaikovsky’s
10/28/2020 10:49:09 AM
