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Kim Jong-Hak November 3 - November 17, 2000 Kim Jong-Hak has been working as a leading artist of post-modernism in Korea since 1990. He uses not only traditional materials and skills but also the found objets from the contemporary society, combining different cultures and creating new images. The paintings of Kim Jong-Hak is on wooden panels painted to resemble rusted iron plates. Over this ground, he juxtaposes the imagery of fruit and plants with the torn pieces of posters. His still-life images are very much enlarged and transformed from the real creating an imposing presence. The ordinary objects such as rivets, screws, bolts and nuts coexist freely with English words and numbers. The image of plants and fruit in contrast to the rusty metal and iron plates may serve as a metaphor of life. The artist has stated; "The Orient and Occident, tradition and modernity, figurative and abstractive, huge and tiny...these opposite and heterogeneous elements blend in my mind and I want to reveal this compound world through the painting..." Kim Jong-Hak's paintings are combination of tradition and modernity, sensibility and rationality, and the Eastern and the Western cultures. Kim Jong-Hak was born in 1954 in Seoul. He studied painting in Seoul National University and in Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. From 1989 to 1994, he lived in Paris. He has held numerous solo and group exhibitions in Korea as well as internationally since 1994.
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