Viewing the Front Page Artwork of the Newsletter(19) ‘Swimming Pool_2’ by artist Lee Sangwon
2017-07-04 l Hit 1348
Viewing the Front Page Artwork of the Newsletter(19)
‘Swimming Pool_2’ by artist Lee Sangwon
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It is July and people are exhausted by continuous heat waves. For the front page artwork this month, we introduce ‘Swimming Pool_2’ by artist Lee Sangwon, created in 2015, to celebrate the vacation season that is starting in earnest.
In the work, the artist painted people who are swimming on a small scale on the 2-meter wide canvas. At first glance, the people look like a pattern on wallpaper, creating the illusion for viewers that the people are moving in choppy waves.
Artist Lee Sangwon paints the crowd on a small scale on a large canvas, dealing with subjects such as the leisure and relaxation of modern people. The artist does not portray a specific person who enjoys leisure, but focuses on the crowd enjoying leisure. He explained, ‘If you look closely at individuals who enjoy their leisure, it is a happy moment for those individuals. However, if you look at them from far away, the leisure overall shares a similar pattern.’ The patterns appear not only in Korea, but other places across regions, cultures, and races. In fact, the artist created a piece titled ‘In Summer’ (2013) that combined summer beach images of other countries that he visited, including Thailand, the United States, France, Italy, and New Zealand.
Since when did the artist become interested in people? He was born in Jeongsan, Chungnam, a rural village deep in the area of Chilgap Mountain, and spent his childhood there. He moved to Seoul when he was in his second year of junior high, and was impressed by the Seoul crowds, since everywhere he went was full of people. Many people would enjoy their free time at the Han River Citizen’s Park near his college during his college days, and it was also interesting for him.
He said, “After the mid-2000s, the five-day work week had been implemented in earnest. As a result, people’s interest in leisure increased and they gathered at resorts such as parks, swimming pools, mountains and the sea during weekends. From that point on, I started to treat these phenomena as subjects for my work.”
When he creates his work, artist Lee Sangwon mainly uses a bird’s eye view, with which the artist observes everything from above, or a panoramic view, which extends the artist’s viewpoint laterally. He uses the viewpoints in order to effectively express the atmosphere of the space with many people. Also, if you look at his work from a few steps away, the work looks like an all-over painting; a painting in which the surface is covered with the same repeated color or shape.
The artist said that those methods are quite suitable for expressing crowd images of modern society. That is because images from those viewpoints allow viewers to imagine beyond the boundaries of the canvas, and those generalized figures without any central character remind us of our own lives.
Artist Lee Sangwon is well known for his crowd at leisure work. However, he creates a wide variety of work in various media; such as acrylics, inks, watercolors and oils; and in different genres, like realistic and abstract paintings. He chooses his medium and genre depending on the subject matter and theme. These days, the artist has been working on recurring images in our society beyond leisure and recreation; such as the military, schools, soccer fields, and trailers on campgrounds.
He will hold his solo exhibition at the Sungkok Art Museum from October 13th and will exhibit his most recent work alongside more diverse pieces.
2017. 7. 12.ⓒKorean Artist Project
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