Seung Ho Yoo
NAL KWON (Flying martial arts)
2020

About the Item

About ‘Nal Kwon’ Nal Kwon is a phonetic representation of the Korean characters 날 and 권 . The character 날(Nal) is derived from the verb 날다 which means fly and Kwon refers to a kind of martial arts. About Seungho YOO’s Work The Korean painter Yoo Seung-Ho is best known for his series of works titled echowords… Through an intricate and time-consuming process, Yoo builds up the image by repeatedly writing childish phrases and onomatopoeias in the Korean alphabet, Han’gŭl. These countless characters form dispersed areas of light and dark that create vague contours which resemble well-known landscape paintings when viewed from afar, but read as scattered text when viewed up close. Excerpt from ‘A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words: The Work of Yoo Seung-Ho’(2006) by Gabriel Ritter, Curator and Head of Contemporary Art at Minneapolis Institute of Art ARTIST STATEMENT My work focuses on the relationship between ‘Writing and Drawing’. From a distance, it appears to be a drawn image but a closer look reveals innumerable minute handwriting strewn over. Therefore, my work is comprised of tiny texts but seen as an image as well. I began to create ‘Text painting’ due to the fascination with blurry brush strokes of Ink wash painting, i.e. smudged contours of Chinese ink on mulberry paper. Such interest towards blurredness has expanded to dismantling the borders between traditional oriental painting and scribble, brush and pencil, and uniqueness and reduplication. ‘Text painting’ is often composed of onomatopoeic or mimetic words. Piles of tiny texts such as ‘Shoo Shoo Shoo-(슈슈슈-)¹', ‘Eng Eng Eng Eng~(앵앵앵앵~)²’, ‘Ung~Ung(엉~엉)³’, ‘Ya~ho(야~호)⁴’, ‘Woo Soo Soo Soo(우수수수)⁵’, ‘Joo roo roo rook(주루루룩)⁶’, and ‘Ung-geum Ung-geum(엉금엉금)⁷’ together form into an image. ‘Echowords’, a term that refers to ‘imitating language’, represents my work. 1. Sound of wind, wave, or flying 2. Buzzing 3. Crying loudly 4. Yahoo 5. Rustling down 6. Sound of falling rain 7. Crawling

Creator:

Seung Ho Yoo (1974, Korean)

Creation Year:

2020

Dimensions:

Height: 16.15 in (41 cm)Width: 11.7 in (29.7 cm)

More Editions & Sizes:

UniquePrice: $1,200

Medium:

Paper,Ink

Movement & Style:

Contemporary