Roh Choong Hyun: Shade

CHAPTER II  2021. 9. 30 - 11. 13

CHAPTER II YARD  2021. 11. 25 - 12. 31

A few years ago, I happened to walk along the Hongjecheon (one of the down streams of the Han river) since I had settled in a new studio in the Seongsan-dong area. Hongjecheon is often called Moraenae. I find the name more intimate and visually apparent. Obviously, it takes time to get used to a new scenery whether it is the Han river or a zoo. I have captured figurative moments in the surrounding environment; painting Moraenae has also followed such a process. At the end of the Moraenae pathway, you can arrive at the Mangwon Hangang park. The landscape of Moraenae is not special. There is a long trail along both sides of the stream with trees and bushes and you can easily encounter small bridges, fishes, mallards, herons and street cats as sceneries of the other general river streams are. What makes Moraenae different is the massive Naebu Expressway crossing over the stream which casts a wide shade. 

In the summer, Moraenae unfolds the innermost and serene atmosphere as its narrow breadth is surrounded by trees and bushes, contrary to the Hangang riverside park. Although the paintings displayed in the <Shade> exhibition have an initial motif from Moraenae, they are not necessarily connected to the place. At the same time, it is hardly unrelated to it either. What I attempt to express in my paintings is not the place per se, but it is approaching the emotions I have had while staying there. The emotions contain a certain warmth. 

As frames of photographs are one of the major resources I use to create a particular impression of the selected landscapes, the process of extracting parts from the given scenes’ entire context is crucial. While I was producing the <Prosaic Landscape> series, the main figurative elements such as a swimming pool, a car park, containers were easy to be separated from their original backgrounds; however, in the Moraenae case, it was difficult to detach specific sceneries as they share similar sequences rather than standing out. Thus, I have tended to carefully catch subtle instants by paying close attention to existing figures including trees, bridges, piers or people whose shadows have a broad spectrum. Accordingly, it turns out that paintings in this exhibition rather repeatedly deliver a certain sentiment which can be defined as either melancholia or grief, instead of presenting diverse sights of Moraenae. In terms of depicting the targets, I let them remain in the state of arousing emotional responses rather than being interested or indulging in their sensuous and aesthetic qualities. 

I believe that there are delicate subjects for each painter. In my case, the reasons I have these tricky things are both a matter of painting techniques and my emotional attitude towards them. Nights and nature are my things. I have always been hesitant about abundant and profound nature. I have felt inadequate for communicating with nature to describe it; in other words, I was too emotionally desolate to paint the invigorating spring or the fertile summer. My mind was not simply enough to embrace four seasons. In addition, I have naturally selected limited options since I was concentrating on conveying social and psychological phenomena in my paintings more than adopting a sense-centric approach towards the landscapes. Styles of representation are still significant for me with regard to putting emphasis on the reality of the depicted objects, whereas it was technically challenging to efficiently demonstrate the complexity of nature with the same strategy. 

I rarely painted nights in the past. It was demanding to figure out what to show through nightscapes for me who did not want to mechanically paint nights. When I was painting the nightscape of Moraenae, I found a clue which helped me to have a deeper understanding about nights and darkness in a phrase by a painter, Yong-Jun Kim(1904-1967)—‘the night is not becoming dark yet it is letting you feel the dark’. In his era, lighting was extremely rare so the night meant a pitch black. Kim believed that painting layers of dark colors to demonstrate the night was a simple-minded perspective. By insisting that the night could be visually achieved either in the dark colors or the light colors, he stressed that the most important purpose of the artistic production depended on what it ultimately implied through its visuals. In order to support this belief—what it implied consequently stemmed from its rationale, Kim cited an appropriate example, <Songhabowoldo>, a painting by Sangjwa Lee. 

As I was preparing the paintings, I was naturally spending time coming up with the title of the exhibition. One day, I was resting under the hot sun rays after reaching the Mangwon-dong dock through the Moraenae trail. Suddenly, I missed the wide shade under the pier of the Naebu Expressway. At that moment, I realized that the place, Moraenae, played a comforting role as a shade for the people passing there. Where you can come to after work, where you can enjoy shades under the bridges, where you can work out for your better shape or where you can peacefully watch fishes drifting under the water. The moments of life holding plain but affectionate humane aspects are what I discovered there.  - Artist’s Note

Roh Choong Hyun (b.1970) has developed his own visual language by combining fragments of ordinary sceneries with individual emotions and interpretations. He completed his BA and MFA degrees in Painting at Hongik University. His solo presentation has opened at several recognized galleries such as Willing N Dealing (2020), Perigee Gallery (2017), Gallery Soso (2015) and Kukje Gallery  (2013). He has also participated in numerous group exhibitions at multiple leading art establishments including Gallery Soso (2021), National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (2021), Nook Gallery (2020), Buk-Seoul Museum of Art (2018), Seoul Museum of Art – South Seoul (2018) and Chapter II (2017). He was selected by the Mongin Art Center Residency Program in 2010.