Lot 1571: HAM MYUNG SU

HAM MYUNG SU
(B. 1966)
City scape
signed, titled, dated and inscribed 'Ham Myungsoo; Cityscape; 2008-2009; oil on canvas; 181.8 x 227.3 cm' in English; signed in Chinese (on the reverse)
oil on canvas
181.5 x 227 cm. (71 1/2 x 89 3/8 in.)
Painted in 2008-2009

In Ham Myung Su's Cityscape (Lot 1571), fields of colors combined with gestural calligraphic strokes give way to a feeling of pure abstraction, unbinding the cold, geometric architecture of buildings in sentimental textures of wool and colorful affability to yield the emotionally and visually expansive traits of an Aerial landscape. Capturing the existential emotional states of modern society and simultaneously curing it, Ham Myung Su deftly achieves his assertion on the motion of painting to offer the disaggregated community a sense of enlightenment with a renovated landscape, awakening the banal phenomena through his cursive strokes that instill harmony as a consistent and collective contour, pulling the viewer to vision the larger picture in wiser perspective of a high vantage point.

Mapping the grid of the metropolis projected from his imagination, Ham's comprehension on astronomical relationship is proficiently fit to the imagined and mathematically calculated aerial perspective of European Antique maps. Ham, too, executes his liberal view on life, constantly envisioning outside his direct surroundings, stretching far and beyond for new possibilities, but also retaining the realistic calculation by meditating his consciousness of the marginal episodes of everyday life, resolved in an open compositional perspective to intentionally convert them as inconsequential by minimizing their size, denoting its trivial existentialism through cohesive detail of jagged strokes of the nauseating plentitude of capitalist properties. Ham's structural intricacy of the work formed with loosely gathered brushstrokes trail his incessantly moving performance of painting, perhaps in insinuation of the process of nature and society that is constantly in flux; suavely impersonating the fluctuation through his technical method of applying color and engraving swirls prior to drying. As he echoes the visceral emotions of abstract expressionism, grappling the spiritual and toxic beauty that brushes aside an oriented compositional focus, Ham emphasizes again through its extensively distributed motifs, the necessity to observe life and the everyday in brighter light and in widespread wisdom.