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Culture & Arts
The Nature of Emotions Via Moosan, Huh Hwe-tae
www.gwangjunewsgic.com
April 2021
CULTURE & ARTS
H
uh Hwe-tae (also known by his artistic name, Moosan, where moo means “exuberant” and san “mountain”) is a well-known Korean calligrapher and contemporary artist. Exploring Chinese calligraphy, Huh goes beyond traditional writing and rises to a new level of artistic expression by using new forms that he has invented. Over time, his work takes on more abstract forms, inspired by art and nature, created by man and without him. Focusing on emotions, moods, and a different state of mind, he departed from the fixed notion of the objects in calligraphic art, breaking away from the restraint imposed by them and exploring his own artistic freedom. In a way, he expresses himself by uniting his emotions with a brush. In 2005, Huh Hwe-tae made his breakthrough transforming his two-dimensional calligraphic murals into three-dimensional art objects, some of which can be described as sculptures. However, we are not talking about traditional sculptures, although the artist creates his objects by modeling, adding material to canvas. This new form that merges calligraphy and painting is called “emography” (emotion + graphy), which transcends the boundary of the modern distinction between writing and drawing/painting. Huh complements the surfaces of his compositions with text and picture elements, producing works with paper that can be seen as “bas relief.” He uses traditional Korean hanji, twisting it into small forms that are covered with finely scribbled calligraphic signs. Hanji refers to paper handmade with mulberry bark that is thin and translucent, easy to press, starch, or fold when it is still not completely dry. It affords great freedom of creation. Huh describes his work process as follows: “First, I write many words and sentences relevant to the theme I have in mind on a small piece of paper, then I wrap them around styrofoam divided into four pieces – the four cardinal points – with papers individually and manually glue them on a canvas one by one. This process looks to me like a process of creating the universe. At first, many tiny, meaningless pieces are integrated together to bloom. The manual process looks like I am planting the codes of emotions to seamlessly communicate with people.”
Immersed and formed in a specific socio-ethnic cultural layer, every artist creates work based on the experience
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By Dr. Tatiana Rosenstein of his social space for certain viewers, focusing on the cultural symbols and representations of society. To understand the art of Huh Hwe-tae and what shaped the artist’s views, it is necessary to place his work in historical context. An important milestone in changing the minds of Koreans was the year 1987, as it marked the activities of the resistance movement, whereupon the citizens of the Republic of Korea were finally able to achieve the establishment of democracy. For national art, this meant the spread of pluralism, postmodern trends, and the opportunity to discover international art, preserving at the same time the originality of their own culture. The trends are reflected in new features like the desire for pure abstraction or emphasized expressiveness inspired by similar movements in Europe, particularly in France, where they are known as art informel. The influence of American art, in particular action painting, undoubtedly built on a heritage of the most prominent representative of the genre, Jackson Pollock, should not be underestimated as well. Protests against academic art came to Korea at the end of the 1960s. They were led by representatives of the informel movement. For example, there was the street display of avant-garde works on the walls of Gyeongbok Palace, while the exhibition of nominees for the National Art Exhibition was held nearby. According to the ideas of informel artists, the affectivity and spontaneity of art works are more important than their rationality. The largest experimental movement in Korean art, in the 1970s, was dansaekhwa (단색화), where style is characterized through monochrome painting and flatness. The style at first glance resembles the color field painting of Mark Rothko or Clyfford Still. Neither Korean nor American artists depict anything specific, but instead utilize monochrome color fields. By closely examining dansaekhwa paintings, one can see the surface, which is composed of numerous textures, including the repeated application and removal of smears. Representative dansaekhwa can be explained as removing paint from the canvas with repeated pencil strokes or scraping and then redoing parts of the paintings, using ideas from the ancient Eastern philosophical schools, in particular Buddhism, in which techniques were compared with the
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