Faceless

Jong-Myung Hwang

November 14th - January 20th 2009

For his first personal exhibition, Addict Galerie supports Jong-Myung Hwang, a young Korean artist, a student of the school of Fine Arts of Dijon, conducted by Yan Pei Ming. His work shows the identity crisis of our contemporary society by being inspired by anonymous faces.

He operates from photographs but his portraits are not for all that true imitations. His technical virtuosity enables him to give up with the mimicking in order to subject his models to imperceptible distortions which bring out a specific feature or to emphasize an expression without summon up any the feeling.

The flesh texture and the bright of the skin, the shape of the face, the place of the eyes and the look, the hairline are shown with a kind of excess of realism where we come in with this fixedness shady and fallacious which is disturbing. The aggressive colours seem to be crushed by a strong lighting which stumps contrasting under a blue light. The faces, in his work, suffer homothetic transformations, and the skin wear violent pink colours with artificial brightness which symbolize the modernity.

By being unaware of their banality and their own ignorance, they put on who observe them, a singular expression where everyone can identify. Hwang find these pitiful swarms in the standardized industrial societies, real cemeteries of the beauty where the world disappears without traces. In Hwang’s canvas all his faces mask the empty in which we sink into. By this way, his work is political. For him, the society is out of breath but the painting is not, in fact, it stays a personal approach, able to produce from the same photograph, very different portraits the artist’s wish. In the painting, there is not a mechanical reproduction from the moment that an artist is able to give back the impression which strike him in his work.

The approach of Hwang still closed of the German Thomas Ruff one’s, of which photograph are more objectives. Nevertheless, Hwang remains above all Korean by giving back the differences who a non oriental cannot perceive. In his mind, the occidental man known as white has a pink skin and he shows us all the variations and shades.

But, above all, this artist is still Korean by the training that he received in his country, like the Chinese teaching, enhance the academic technique as David’s workshop. There, we learn drawing and painting with virtuosity without intellectualize too much, unlike the French school of Fine Arts where we are more talking about hard concepts than executing difficult things. If the technical master of an art is not enough to be a genius, at least it attests the talent. And Hwang who go it was able to impose his artist’s vision to a know-how but voluntary forgotten like Picasso who as succeeded by investing beyond what he has been teached.

Like other people, Asian artists who work in France, highlight this technique by the very deconstruction that they acquire in their schools.