Yeo Hyun Kwon is an avant-garde artist. Since his debut in 1980, he has produced tremendous amounts of work covering various media; painting, photography, drawing, sculpture, installation, performance and video. The level of his productiveness has been proved by thirty or more of his solo exhibitions he has had in and abroad the country. Kwon utilizes his eyes, nose, mouth, ears and even his tongue, hands, feet, and skin to analyze the essence and phenomena, and the self and others. Kwon’s greed for art is evident in this habit. I have once termed his paintings a ‘republic of images’. However, now I observe them to be a ‘federation’ instead of a republic. It is an enormous federal that links images with the arts of philosophy, psychology and sociology. This can be seen in the diversity and hybridity of his work. Rich, multifaceted and even loquacious works of Kwon are composed of parallel layers of the combined. Therefore, his works are a heresy to purebred-dominated Modernism but a liberal zone for crossbred-honored Postmodernism. In short, Kwon’s paintings are overloaded, sophisticated, passionate and calm.

Yeo Hyun Kwon’s keywords of his recent works are; conatus, Ewige Wieder-Kunft, monad, spiral circulation, ambivalence, the mirror stage, the gaze, glimpse of the real, macguffin, desire, hegemony upon ideology. Conatus, mentioned in the title of his painting earlier, is an ‘urge and desire to sustain, develop and complete one’s self’ as Spinoza had stated. Therefore, the meaning derived from the title itself, is a world of continuous lives. Nevertheless, Spinoza had said that the best of conatus will be displayed through the political system and so the forest is not a world of darkness and chaos but a world composed with harmonic relationships. However, humans are not the ones who conquer this world. They are rapped around with Ouroboros and stems flowing out of the tree. The Ouroboros biting its tail creates a big circle and symbolizes reincarnation or eternalness where the beginning is the end and the end becomes another beginning.

abstracted from ' Forest of the Combined, An Intrusion Between Reason and Desire'
Tae Man Choi / Art Critic