Han Mook (1914- ) is one of the Korea’s earliest geometric abstract artists who heralded their arrival in the Korean art world between the late 1960s and 1970s. The geometric abstract art in Korea hadn’t been able to show a certain well-established style and a continuous group movement, but stimulated the Korean art community to free themselves from the uniform atypical abstract art and explore experimental abstract art. Han had been devoted to the study of geometric abstract theories until he found the fundamental images of nature and the universe created via visual effects from brilliant primary colors and geometric abstract forms.
The spiral structure displayed in this work, Space, is the artist’s basic compositional element which started to appear after the 1970s to show the beauty of well-calculated order with no emotional involvement. The spiral continues to converge into the innermost point while diffusing outward incessantly, making viewers feel both depth and width. It is not a simple mechanical aesthetic element but one containing its own secret logic creating its own rhythm and reverberation. According to the artist’s own explanation, the key of his art is a “kinetic form” that can enable infinite propagation and a symbol of life that never ceases.
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.
