Introduction
“Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces,
I would still plant my apple tree.”
Born in Seoul, South Korea during a politically charged climate, fine artist Han Chong Yop has been creating works of art for over a career that spans six decades. From a young age, Han had an affinity for expressing his emotions through creation, prompting him to attend a specialized fine arts school in his youth. Throughout his adolescence, he found himself always questioning the array of social contradictions he believed to be present in his surroundings, transforming his identity to be one he characterizes as “resistant”. This stance of resistance only further intensified in university and led him to what he refers as his ‘turning point’ in self-discovery, learning from two masters of fine arts Chang-Tyeol Kim and Seung-Hwa Jeong. It is this education that he attributes the foundation of his work even today.
With a number of accolades including art prizes from two former Prime Ministers of South Korea and winner of the International Fine Arts Contest in Naples, Han has also participated in competitions and exhibitions in Germany, Spain, Greece and Italy. Based for the last 40 years in Athens, Greece, the South Korean expatriate’s cultural influence and longing played a large role in the first works he produced. The yearning for home is clearly visible in the harmonious abstract neighborhood scenes from Seoul with the bright spring colors he associated with home. The evolution of his subject matter and technique however, came from a need to comment on his surroundings, and on what made him uncomfortable. It was the search for a form of artistic expression to emphasize the structured conflict within the elements of emotion and reason that his medium was created. Although classically trained, Han experimented with the idea of the “discarded”, initially only with the painted canvas. Han discovered that ripping a simple painted image and piecing it back together differently not only created different layers of textures, colors and meanings; but that the actual physical act of tearing the canvas to be cathartic and a physical representation of the pain of ongoing changes.
Playing with the idea of disrupting ebb and flow, Han creates embossed textures that pierce through the back of the canvas and then gouges it out to reapply in a form of canvas collage; a technique that is uniquely attributed to the artist. Metal scratching is also used to apply even further distress and ensue the canvas with the “harshness” of the material. When he feels that these methods aren’t expressing the themes of disruption enough, he applies what he calls a “stereoscopic technique” form of collage to intervene the natural flow of the paint with refused materials whether they be canvas or discarded technological conveniences. The flow of paint symbolizes nature, and how man-made elements often restrict or re-direct that flow; creating stunning impasto canvases layered with energy, color and intricacies.
Social constructs are a heavy theme throughout Han’s work; how the gap between the rich and the poor continues to grow exponentially, or how individual values are being watered down with every passing year. Han himself has said of his work that he aims to “depict the process of people recovering their lost sense of identity in the midst of all those tumults”, by creating noise of materials on a canvas it is up to the observer to find themselves in the elements on the canvas. His work can be broken down into four distinct periods Semi-Abstract, Abstract, Realistic Abstraction and Collage, each heavily focusing on the themes he experiences as an innate observer and commentator of the social political landscape. In large, Han harbors a strong desire to offer his own perspective and engaging commentary on the world that surrounds him the only way he knows how – through his intense creativity. The fine artist encompasses even metaphoric expressions in painting by moving back and forth the boundary of abstractness and branching out to collage; bringing out the remnants of the primitive loneliness, fragility and pain, but still lit by a spark of hope. Han has often described his artworks as his last will and testament to the world, “My inspiration seeks for criticisms of the ever-changing modern civilization and the solutions for it”.