원문자(元文子, 1944- )의 한국화

Abstract

Although the discourse of modernity in Korean painting has been discussed since the 1950s, the answer to the question “What is modernization?” is still very controversial. In this article, I have tried to find the answer by examining the world of art works of Won, Moonja(元文子, 1944- ). Since the 1960s, when she first started to work as an oriental painting artist, she has explored all techniques that can be expressed in Jipilmook 紙筆墨. Succeeding the prototype of a deep-coloured painting of flowers and birds that were the symbols of luck and the wish-granting, in East Asia, she has transformed into a light-coloured ink-and-wash painting and completed small-scenery paintings about everyday life. Since the mid 1980s, she has simplified formality of shapes based on splashing, light colouring, and pre-dyeing, Since 1989, she has attempted to make a relievo using Hanji. In the 2000s, she completed the semi-3-dimensional abstract paintings of homogeneous particles. The foundation of her ‘modernity of Korean painting’ is Jipilmook, which she has experimented with for a long time. She has suggested that modernization of Korean painting is accomplishable by trying all the techniques created by combining Hanji, brush, ink, color pigments, and glue with ‘water’, which are distinguished from Western painting materials. For a moment she did not leave traditional materials, but she explored their properties, shifted from planar to solid, expanded from concept to abstract, and from deep-coloured to light-coloured. This may be the modernity that her Korean painting has achieved.