Artists reimagine nature's earthly grandeur

By Park Han-sol

As long as art has existed, it has communed with nature and its mesmerizing, untamed power in one way or another.

In paintings and sculptures, Mother Nature’s quiet grandeur becomes a muse — a wellspring of meditative beauty and a sweeping metaphor for the human experience.

Two exhibitions in Seoul spotlight artists whose canvases reimagine earthly splendor with an expressive — and at times, pensive — twist.

Kang Myong-hi’s ‘Visit’

What unfolds on Kang Myong-hi’s canvas in luminous silence is not a single, defined scene from the natural world, but rather a dreamy fusion of her memories and sensations accumulated over the years.

Since leaving for France in 1972, the now-78-year-old artist spent much of the next three decades traversing the globe — from Mongolia’s Gobi Desert and Patagonia’s windswept plains to Antarctica, India and Hong Kong — in pursuit of landscapes unmarred by human intervention. Upon returning to her studio, she rendered the shapes and hues she had come across, painting not from mere sight but from memory.

After returning to her homeland in 2007, she settled on Jeju Island, where she continues to capture its small villages, volcanic mountains, wintry forests and valleys through delicate brushstrokes and soft washes of color.

The title of her new retrospective at the Seoul Museum of Art, “Visit,” borrowed from one of her works, reflects Kang’s semi-nomadic lifestyle of never fully settling in one place, as well as the artistic inspiration she draws from transient encounters with nature.

Through 125 oil paintings, pastel drawings and watercolors, the exhibition offers a rare glimpse into the unwavering six-decade career of an artist whose presence has largely gone unnoticed in her home country since her departure.

One of the show’s standout pieces greets visitors right at the entrance: “North Garden,” a single towering 5.3-meter-long canvas work that, according to curator Park Ji-su, was “too large to fit inside the museum’s gallery.”

It’s an absorbing portrait of the lush garden surrounding her former studio in Touraine, France, that was born from an unexpected impulse — an “urge to use up all of the paints she had brought from Korea.” In a moment of raw creativity, Kang began squeezing paint tubes onto the canvas with her feet. The piece, which took eight years to complete, evolved as she engaged deeply with the land, feeling the fine soil, pulling out weeds and clearing rocks and roots by hand. The act of painting and the act of gardening — wielding a brush and a sickle alike — became one.

The work encapsulates Kang’s lifelong fascination with nature as a space that holds the origins of life, death and everything in between.

“Visit” runs through June 8.

‘Sublime Simulacra’

Lehmann Maupin Seoul’s “Sublime Simulacra,” curated by Seoul-based art critic Andy St. Louis, brings together an unexpected group of four Korean and American painters — Kim Yun-shin, Kim Chang-euk, Hong Soun and Scott Kahn — through an intriguing philosophical lens: “simulacrum.”

Their landscape paintings, each rendered in distinct styles of geometric figuration, organic abstraction, realism and surrealism, explore the shifting relationship between images and the natural realities they claim to represent.

Among the featured creatives, Hong is best known for his “Sidescape” series, which appropriates newspaper photos and strips them of their original purpose by shifting focus to the vast background landscapes — elements meant to be disregarded.

In this group show, however, it’s his latest series, “Unfamiliar Familiar Landscape,” that demands immediate attention. Unlike his previous works, these paintings are inspired by photographs he takes himself, blending the scenery with personal memories tied to the places he has visited.

“This series began two years ago when my wife’s health started to drastically decline,” the artist told The Korea Times. “I grew up as an athlete, so I never really took in the scenery; I was always running past it. But walking slowly to match her pace, I suddenly started seeing the landscapes in a completely different, almost foreign way. It caught me by surprise. ‘Unfamiliar Familiar Landscapes’ is about that very experience.”

“Sublime Simulacra” runs until March 15.