Description
By Park Hyung-Jin, South Korea.
Hyung-Jin doesn’t consider himself a photorealist painter since he does not pursue perfect registration of the actual details of his models.
Instead, he strives to create figures more representative of an aesthetic utopia than real people. He seeks to express ideal beauty through modifications that may involve subtly enlarged eyes, narrowed chins, or skins with a glazed appearance, similar to Oriental ceramics.
Hyung-Jin stays far from Asian anime clichés, but his works are arguably Asian in the sense that they value spiritual experience over reality. As a global citizen and international artist, he transcends and merges the undercurrents of Western and Eastern artistic traditions in his unique vocabulary of form and texture. Instead of highly accurate depictions, striking imagery is what Hyung-Jin is after. Working from a stance of realism, he wants the subjects in his works to evoke some atmosphere beyond the sterile objectivity of photorealism.
Hyung-Jin used to teach art at Konkun University and Hansung University in Korea, and all the models he has worked with so far are his students.
Individual collectors own his works, like Howard Tullman in Chicago, and several museums, such as the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Seoul, South Korea.