이상원

​

Introduction

Taking old masterpieces, ordinary images or old machine parts as figurative elements, Han has been creating works that freely move between the West and East, past and present, art and daily life, and reality and non-reality. Disparate elements clash and integrate with one another in his works,continuously transforming, through which a new world is portrayed which goes beyond the limits of time and space. The fundamental questions underlying Han's oeuvre are "time" and "space," which are specified by reproducing time and exploring the origins of space. To compare, the artist is similar to a philosopher or anthropologist who searches for "the origin of the world." Then how are these questions represented? In assemblage. Assemblage, which dominates Han's body of work, reflects a modernist way of thinking; for it can be viewed as a metaphor for modernity that is constructed by the combination of disparate fragments, unlike a holistic world or mythological world view. Meanwhile, Han Man-Young's assemblage reveals above all the artist's vision and spirit as it inscribes time inside space and also arranges or extends traces of it inside space. Here we should see assemblage as an investigation on a philosophical level beyond a formative methodology. In the series <Origin of the Space>, we can see the will of the artist to suggest a 'hierarchy of space' by intentionally removing the illusions of perspective yet inserting another plane or a 3-dimensional space onto a plane. Such an attempt to surmount the limitations of a flat surface is activated more strongly as he uses the 3-dimensionality of a box. With a closer look we notice that mirrors, attached on the side faces inside the box, are reflecting and extending the represented space indicated by the painting into a tangent face, which also seems to subvert the order of Renaissance perspective. The series <Reproduction of Time>, on the other hand, is usually composed of images taken from Western and Eastern art histories which are then combined with everyday objects. This ranges from ancient artefacts to Marylin Monroe, actress Hwang Shinhye, wires, parts of clocks and an old television. This use of images/objects typically representing Western and Eastern art histories and civilizations is often compared with Duchamp's readymade and Warhol's pop art as well. Nouveau realists at that time are said to have witnessed a social phenomenon of desiring via different products of civilization, 'wealth' itself beyond material conveniences. So if Nouveau realists inferred a relation between the material and spiritual in the context of capitalism, Han's objects should rather be seen as a surrealistic device that mediates experience and memory. The assemblage which recombines symbols extracted from different times, histories or places can be also interpreted, not as a combination of meanings, but as an attempt to render ambivalent reality real. In short, the surreal here is closer to depaysement, which defamiliarizes reality, rather than an ideology. 
 

​

Artist's Note
I collect things from everyday life that are totally irrelevant. It combines the past and the present. It's unfamiliar.
The mixed emotions of the East and the West, in a strange world that is neither real nor ideal, over around the reality.