Studio Art Lecture: Inkie Whang

Digital Sansuhwa Inkie Whang is one of the most important artists currently at work in Korea. He was selected as The Korean National Museum of Contemporary Art's "Artist of the Year" in 1997 and was one of three Korean artists selected to represent the country at the 2003 Venice Biennial. In 2004 The Andy Warhol Foundation chose to give Inkie a grant to create a 186 foot-long mural for the Atlanta College of Art. Inkie was one of eight artists featured at the Asian Art Museum's "Leaning Forward, Looking Back: Eight Contemporary Artists from Korea" in 2003. This was San Francisco's first opportunity to experience his artwork. A meeting between the gallery owners and Inkie led to his inclusion in the gallery's Fall, 2004,"Asian Invitational," and a trip in January, 2005 to visit with him at his studio in the countryside, about 100 miles south of Seoul. Trained as a painter in both the United States and Korea, Inkie has described much of his recent art as "digital sansuhwa," a reinvention of traditional Korean ink and brush landscape painting using new technologies and innovative materials. Kang Seungwan, curator at the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea, further describes Inkie's art as "digitized landscapes [that] successfully illustrate models of assimilation and transformation of traditional naturalism in the context of modern materialist and technology-driven civilization." Inkie's distinct visual idiom combines traditional Korean painting, art theory learned mostly in the United States, and appropriated popular imagery such as advertising. He makes use of an eclectic range of materials such as acrylic paint, Lego blocks, synthetic Austrian crystals, rivets, washers and cast materials of the artist's own invention. Above text from www.freynorris.com