“Thunder Tower” (1976) is one of the formative works presenting the newly transited sense of space through the recognition of the outer space. The composition, in which outwardly short lines and faces are linked in zigzag from the horizontal and vertical central axis, as well as the use of strong, primary colors vividly deliver the sense of space stretching out infinitely as they make the beholders feel dizzy. As evident in the title “Thunder Tower,” such expansion into infinite space confines the explosive, strong energy.
Han Mook (b. 1914) graduated from the Kawabata Art School, Japan. He held a number of solo and group exhibitions at Korea, France, and the US including “An Aspect of Korean Contemporary Art - in the 1950s to the 1960s” (The National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea, currently MMCA) in 2000. He served on the faculty of the College of Fine Arts at the Hongik University, and received the Camellia Order of Civil Merit in 1972.
Han Mook was one of the members of a non-mainstream art group, the Modern Art Society, in the 1950s, and he pursued his art mainly in Paris after he went to France in 1961. He has presented a variety of genres, yet his main interest lay in exploring the space within the canvas. During the 1950s, he often created pieces revealing the realizations from the war and desperate, dark aspects thereof. In the early phase, Han expressed such theme in a representational manner, yet later he experimented with compositions presented with lines and faces, which foretells the following transition to abstract paintings. Han Mook absorbed many artistic trends he came across in the Paris art circle in the 1960s, during which he often created works of Informel style. Upon entering the 1970s, Han established his own unique formative principle, an attempt triggered by the moon landing of humankind in 1969. For Han who had continuously explored the space on a two-dimensional canvas, the moon landing was an event that introduced a new idea of space to Han. As a result, he went beyond the imitation of two-dimensional space and delved into the four-dimensional sense of space of the cosmos where time and space were combined, and in order to visualize such dynamic, infinite space, Han adopted spiral composition in his painting. Han Mook’s unique formative orld―the infinite and dynamic sense of space expressed on two-dimensional painting―was finally realized in the “Space” series. The dynamic composition based on spiral forms became richer and ampler as it went through many variations including collage from the 1990s to 2000s. Such interest in a new dimension reflects the concern for the essence of being lying beyond the visual world of our surroundings.
