Mes (2008)
Min, Kyeong Ah
Artist Statement: "The title of this work, <MES>, means that all the people looking at Jesus are all my various aspect. So I named me as <MES> in plural. In the background of the painting appears the painting <SSireum: Korean wrestling> by Kim Hong-Do (artist of the late Joseon dynasty). All of them are figures borrowed from this painting. In the middle of this work, I borrowed the Crucifixion from <Grünewald's Isenheim Altarpiece 1515>, Matthias Grünewald is a 16th century German painter. Borrowing images in postmodernism takes its own place in the history of modern art. It assumes that spectators already know great value of the original works. The images borrowed in the following works are classified into three categories: masterpieces in Western Christianity, Korean paintings in late Joseon dynasty. First, I borrow several Western masterpieces since Christian faith have long been expressed in works of art from the Western perspective. In this way I hope to help people feel at ease with the communicated biblical stories. Next, I borrow several Korean indigenous images from the paintings in the late Joseon dynasty which show a uniquely Korean identity independent from the Chinese culture. In order to express my identity as a Korean artist and to carry on the Korean cultural tradition, I borrow genre paintings of Joseon dynasty. With the emerging issue of consilience in mind, I reconstructed these materials— that is, images from the East and the West that were used in different works of art and thus had no intrinsic relationship with one another—so that each of them should be found in one piece of artwork. This suggests moving forward to a new phase through conflict and reconciliation between the past and the present, and between the East and the West."
