This time, for the KOREAN ART SHOW, Rho Gallery introduces Yoon Byung-rock, a young artist who is attracting wide attention from many art people in Korea, Hongkong, and several other Asian countries.
Most of Yoon's works are filled with apples painted in hyper-real style. This is why many people call him an "Apple Painter." Apple is one of the most 'common (widely known and easy to find)' fruits in the world. The fruit is so 'friendly' to human beings across the ages and in all countries of the world. Historically, we can find this fruit in the Holy Bible and ancient Chinese documents (the earliest ones were probably written in the 4th century). Moreover, the fruit appears in science (Isacc Newton's Apple), in classics like , and also in the logo of famous international computer enterprise.
Yoon Byung-rock has a special obsession with this 'common' fruit not only because he has unforgettable memories of an orchard where he spent his young days but also because he thinks that art could have a meaning when it talks of daily life. This is why the apples in his works contain and express the particular emotions formed in Korean everyday life. And this is why we cannot tell they are just the formal representations of the fruit.
In Yoon's paintings, the 'hyper-real' apples are put in wooden boxes which do not match them without any orders. These wooden boxes are special devices which are related to the nostalgia and memories of Koreans because they were widely used years ago, but are somewhat hard to find these days. In Yoon's canvases, the boxes are described so truthfully along with the illusionistic settings and atmosphere that they look like real ones existing in real spaces. Overall, the paintings evoke and revive the past. Yoon deformed frames of his canvases so that they could accord with the forms of things painted on them. With this transformation, he intended to expand the internal space of his paintings to infinity. Moreover, the use of special frames helps his works look like objects.
Yoon's paintings filled with fresh and lively apples and lifeless boxes are loved by a lot of collectors. It is worth to expect Yoon's bright future steps because he is a passionate young artist who has a great energy to make continuous advances in his art world and change the contemporary Korean art scene in much more interesting and multifarious ways.
- Seung-Jin Rho
CEO of Rho Gallery, Seoul, Korea
