akive

Yoo Geuntaek is a contemporary painter who is using traditional materials like rice paper, round brush and sumi ink as vessel that conveys meaning of the daily lives and reminders of the reality. The work entitled, ”The Blind who Leads the Blinds” (1999) and “The Landscape Outed The Window” (1999) offered a turning point for his art from which he chose mundane lives as subject matter and started his signature display style. It is what distinguishes him from the other in which he used method of smearing both light and dark inks into each other while using thick opaque colored figures with gouache and aleuron contrasting to is back ground. On the picture plane, he harmoniously incorporates perspectives representation from the west, philosophy of the east and personal experience. And this in turn makes up his contemporary interpretation of traditional ink paintings. Light, anecdotal subjective matters in his paintings are now further developed into the issues of historicity and narratives as its documentary nature allow him to utilize such motives as retrieval devise. The reality in his paintings adds one more layer in documenting chasm between past and present.