Byunghee Sung-artist
성병희
The figures on the canvas composed of faint complexions, eyes tinged with red color, and hand gestures can remind the spectators of a variety of senses and emotions. The Big, pallid, white faces might invoke the sentiment of a lonely clown whose true self is destined to be cloaked under the thick, white made-up complexion. They can also reflect either the ghastly fear of burdensome life or the exhausted state of soul leading to the loss of luster and vitality. Reddish rings around the eyes might represent the sorrow making the eyes turgid with blood, or rage making them bloodshot, or curiosity full of passionate concentration...or the deeper, profound real identity of existence whose true color has long been camouflaged under the ever-thickening white make-up and fake stage costumes. Reddish fingertips may stand for the damage and wound from within and without, distress and agony,..and years of painful toils out of the incessant quest for an answer. The human hands are usually regarded as the means of revealing his/her unconscious state of mind. The hand gestures in the works could seem like a certain kind of sign language, but not exactly the same. Rather, delicate gestures of hands and fingers may reveal at length something that eyes and complexions missed expressing, thus enriching the symbolic world of the art works.
Every work of art tends to mirror the person who sees it. The interpretation of the meaning in the art text, therefore, is always open to the spectators, I believe.
July, 2012.
Byunghee Sung
critic
A Portrait of Pain-Ridden Human Existence
Byunghee Sung has consistently created on the canvas the images of humans with anxiety-stricken eyes, laden with external constraint of silence or self-produced, corroding emptiness. They could be regarded as either specific individuals with their own history of pain, or universal human existence suffering and collapsing from the repetitious, cumbersome routine of life bringing about external and internal barrenness and vacancy.
Human figures in her recent paintings are presented in simpler and more abstract forms teeming with symbolic implications. She seems to have broken from the previous concrete mode of expression in which more vivid and descriptive images were represented with numerous details. Paradoxically, however, the symbolic images and minimalist composition on the canvas without any specific setting or explanatory background attract explicitly and with intensity the viewers’ attention and stimulate strong emotional response. The faces with bleak, appealing look and hand gestures reveal the traces of wound and bloodstain of a person who can be interpreted either as a girl or a woman. The gestures of her hands, reminiscent of a sign language, are inseparably entangled with the expression on the faces. The stark contrast between the pale, nearly albinistic faces whose age is inestimable and the reddish hue of the eye rims and fingertips suggests with subtlety the darkness deep within both the person portrayed and human beings in general. The exquisite balance between the intense and strong contrast of color, and the refrained composition in canvas provides paradoxically abundant implications in which the artist seems to not only inform the viewers of her own individual story of suffering, but invite them to experience what she feels and reflect on the universal condition of human existence including our own.
Byunghee Sung has constantly focused on the faithful and warm-hearted portrayal of human beings in pain in a variety of circumstances, among which there were the military oppression and ideological conflicts in the modern history of South Korea. If, in the 1990s, she created the realistic portrayal of underprivileged class of people, divulging the severe condition of their living, in 2010 she returned with rather self-reflective portraits as a result of observing but keeping distance from her own life as a working mother nurturing a boy in a single-parent family. Now, her new artworks, with more surreal and phantasmal tones than ever, still seem to never give up warm-hearted, affectionate gaze at the distress and grief in the earthbound human existence.
Suwon Ryu (art critic)
© 2014 by ByungheeSung / sungbhee@hanmail.net