Time in the city flows quickly, and the human heart wears out even more easily.

 

 

Standing still within that gray time, the artist lives with two hearts. One follows the rhythm of everyday life and bears the weight of reality; the other beats slowly toward the world of the artist. Han Jun-ho’s work is born between these two hearts, on the boundary between reality and the inner self. His surface is completed not by adding layers, but through the act of scraping away. He lays down color with oil pastels, covers it with black lacquer, and then scratches away that darkness one stroke at a time to bring out the light. This act is not merely a painting technique, but a record of time in which the artist purifies himself through repeated hours of patience. Where tens of thousands of knife strokes have passed, it is not wounds but life that emerges; the lines thus born vibrate like the breath of light tearing through darkness, radiating the rhythm of life.

 

 

Han Jun-ho’s forest is the green memory we have lost. It is the shape of longing that suddenly surfaces in the gray gaps of the city — Querencia. The garden in his Querencia series is a place of rest for the heart, where one can breathe freely without interference from the world, and within it the artist has planted the aesthetics of “rest.” These are not city trees exhausted by density and competition, but quiet lives that have grown in order, at a respectful distance from one another. As the viewer lets their gaze stroll between those trees as if taking a walk, they slowly retrieve the memory of nature that remained within them. That light is the lingering echo of an old prayer in praise of nature, and a song that calls forth the “green memory” to which we must all someday return.

 

 

New Beginning, Querencia, Everything Is Connected as One — this sequence of journeys is, in a sense, the trajectory Han Jun-ho has long followed. For him, nature is relationship: the meaning of circulation and mutual facing in which beings reflect one another. On his surfaces, light and darkness, stillness and vibration coexist, and they awaken in us, who live in an age of severance, the meaning of “connection” once more.

 

 

This exhibition is another variation and expansion of the path he has walked.

 

 

New works in a new format, which combine the Garden Series he has continued over the years with the New Beginning series, stand at the center of this show. Among the three questions he posed to himself when he began painting — “What do I paint, how do I paint, and why do I paint?” — the artist has focused here especially on the question of “how.” This is not simply a change in method of expression, but an attempt to rethink how his inner self relates to nature. In the images that appear not by applying light but by stripping away darkness, Han Jun-ho questions anew the very essence of the act of painting. It is the condensation of the time he has traversed, and the place where he reweaves the invisible threads of light that link human and nature, being and being. Even in the city’s darkness, he continues to draw light with the tip of his knife.

 

 

.Today we stand before Han Jun-ho’s forest. That forest speaks through silence: “All living things resemble one another.” And that quiet truth, through these new works, once again awakens the green within us.

 

 – Soonshim Lee, Director of Gallery Now

 

Gallery NoW

16, Eonju-ro 152, Gangnam-gu, Seoul, Korea

02-725-2930

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