허진 Hurjin

Hur Jin: Anonymous Humans and Modernism

  By Oh Byung-uk, Dongguk University Professor

Anonymous Humans

Hur Jin’s works feel clamorous. All kinds of things, animals, plants, and people are in the scenes of his paintings. These bar us from closely observing them one by one due to their tumultuous style. They give the impression that they are unsettled and floating like television images. A chain of incidents reported on the news causes astonishment and excitement, but they are pushed away from our memories by ensuing events rather than being grasped and settled. We are alienated from affairs of the world. There is no difference between good and evil in contemporary life as if there are incidents but no truths. Contemporary humans who cannot be the subjects of their lives always remain passive, indistinctive and repressed. Hur Jin has seriously addressed aspects of contemporary life as his primary theme, evolving it into his distinctive artistic form. Anonymous Humans, a subject he had dealt with for several years, is a portrait of contemporary people who have lost their humanity. His contemporary humans appear reduced to outlines and shadows. And yet, they are all busy working, troubled and frustrated. They are oppressed and cannot find solutions to their problems. Captured in Anonymous Humans-A Journey V are urinals, plastic bottles, traffic signs, orchids, chairs, shoes, elephants, deer, camels, and giraffes that have nothing to do with one another.

 Hur intersects completely different situations and objects as if they are scenes from different TV channels. He brings together objects found at random or by chance or characterless objects that have lost their nature. His works can be seen as collages or montages of modern visual images or virtual realities. His method of random selection and reiteration is identical with the way we experience affairs in the world. Hur has represented insincere chance meetings, a group of people like scarecrows and uncanny looking scenes deviating from nature and history under the theme of Anonymous Humans. In this context, he has painted “anonymous animals” presented in this exhibition. His son sees numerous animals on TV programs and knows of their names and ecology, but Hur feels sorry that his son has never seen and touched them firsthand. The situation where one sees and understands animals through TV rather than immediate communion with them, such as patting or embracing a puppy, and the situation where reality is replaced with virtual reality has been getting more serious. Hur is provoked by and tries to represent these situations: realities in which all people are alienated by others and pain, frustration and anger.

Modernism

odernists take an attitude of wanting to remove meaning, history, delusion and individual imagination from objects, focusing on themselves. They put all emphasis on an object’s form, texture and color. Numerous objects in Hur Jin’s works are observed and portrayed from this modernist perspective. The Tale of the Body is a work consisting of iconic images of bodily organs such as the stomach, heart, kidney, eyes, tongue, and womb. Their organic relation and significance is removed and deconstructed and then reproduced as useless pieces. They become objects with special forms, forming a work of art. Such special objects were in fashion worldwide and considered works of art throughout the 20th century. The generalization or universalization of this modernist perspective hinders art’s communicative function. An attitude of regarding meaning as something unnecessary deters artistic imagination and creativity. It is hard to find any exchange of and discussion on this meaning in a work of modernist art. Newly found color, form and material draw our attention for a while but this is all. What’s significant in modernism is not meaning – meaning that has to be considered most important and the source of all art forms – but stylistic characteristics, individual technique, special form and color and their freestanding evolution. There have been many discourses on modernist art but they were for only 

structuralism, semiotics and feminism. They could not offer any in-depth analyses of each artwork. These are nothing but superficial observations of artworks, exposing the underlying limits of the modernist art style. We cannot define Hur Jin as a modernist. He has wanted to talk about himself, his surroundings and society and has done this well. However, his creed is not free from the rules of modernist idioms. His outcry is not heard due to his moderation and his simmering brushwork feels comfortable because of his modeling formality. Although his work resembles the structure of a society that is passive, depersonalized and repressive, it inevitably reflects that his indifferent, refined representation is just to overcome this. Hur stands at a crossroads where he has to hone the themes he has pursued more keenly, departing from modernism and post-modernism. (I feel no difference between the two modes.)