Fountain

In October 2021, artist Yoo Geun-taek won the Lee In-seong Art Award (the 22nd), which can be the biggest prize in our flower bed. Based on themes derived from nature and humans, environment and social problems, it was highly appreciated that it reproduced Korean painting from a modern perspective by practicing experimental materials and screens.

Using oriental painting materials, the artist transforms boring daily life into unfamiliar scenes. It captures momentary and fleeting phenomena occurring in small daily life and presents them in the form of a compressed space-time, not a momentary moment, but a mediating and compressed accumulated events, time, and history that form the moment.

In his work, he opens the possibility of creating a new narrative by mixing all forms of hints such as moment, impermanence, and fluidity that nature, humans, the environment, and society are triggered by inevitable changes through the process of bumping, seeing, and breathing in everyday life. This creates a complex and multi-layered painting structure with the Mimesis-like
spirit of the artist moving toward the fundamental essence of nature.

In this way, Yoo Geun-taek's paintings seem to be talking about individual narratives in everyday life, but in fact, social and psychological layers are found behind them. Daily life is not just a repetitive structure, but a world with the potential to change infinitely. This is where writer Yoo Geun-taek's new narrative and poetic imagination is located, and it is also a part that has been continuously emphasized through his pictorial world. Although everyday materials such as people, villages, landscapes, gardens, and fountains are used, the narratives pressed inside the stacked lights are infinite beyond time and space.