Name Ko Young-hoon McCune–Reischauer Ko Yonghun | Revised Romanization Go Yeonghun Hangul 고영훈 | |
Born 1952 (age 63–64) | ||
Ko Young-Hoon (born 1952) is a South Korean painter.
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Biography
Ko was born in 1952 on Jeju Island, and went on to graduate from Hongik University. He lives and works in Seoul. His work is known for its hyperrealism bordering on trompe l'oeil.
Art
By representing objects with their most minute details, Ko, in the line of Magritte, questions our beliefs in authenticity and objectivity. But if his work clearly draws on Western influences, it is also the product of an almost mystical reflexion on traditional Korean aesthetic values and on the concepts of nothingness (mu 無) and existence (yu 有).
His work can be considered pertaining to both Hyperrealism and Surrealism. The critic Gérard Xuriguera says of his series Stonebook: "Combining in his painting lettered messages and their relation to stones, he positions them within the pages of an open book or imposed on newspapers, strangely gravity-free, in a way that creates contrasts in tension, modifying the sense of the displaced objects. This creates a sort of wakened dream, never broken from natural ebbs, in which reality and illusion combine."