Hee Choung Yi

Yi Hee Choung(이희중 李熙中 1956) is a Korean Painter, Profession Western painting, university, Department of Painting, College of Culture and Art, Yongin University

Hee Choung Yi's works have their own achievements from various perspectives, from reconstruction of traditional order, fresh transformation of material, to expressive power of past and modern formative senses. Often, his work is often understood in terms of the modern transformation of tradition, which is only a superficial approach, viewed from a fragmentary point of view. His work is distinctly different from the effort to succeed in modernizing and reinterpreting the 'Korean emotion' and inherent tradition that many writers made in the 1980s. The traditional material that emerges from the work is to contain the remnant memories of the universe and the circular elements that are permanently connected from ancient times to modern times. Therefore, Lee Hee - jung 's works are the expressions of emotional expression, and the desire for universal value that is the source of mankind that can not be handed down lightly.

There is a kind of secret rhetoric in the atmosphere that makes Hee-Choung Yi's work possible. He reinterprets traditional symbols and elaborately fills the canvas. There are familiar images like the mountains, fields, birds and butterflies; but sometimes they are seen as unfamiliar. The familiarity is our memories of hometown hidden within our mind, and the unfamiliarity is the vague shadow of our hometown that we longer visit. Hee-Choung Yi connects the familiarity and unfamiliarity on his canvas through a unique composition. Each color point gathers into a form and becomes the background. He links each form with the color section as if to embroider and connect the other parts of the canvas. The true nature of his formative languages lies in the connections. Hee-Choung Yi's reinterpretation of Korean symbols proceeds to explore existence itself, which is the origin of symbols. He does not simply define existence but inquires into the meaning of it. His skillful brushwork becomes a story connecting the abyss to the past and the present.

The unconsciousness that drifts in the depths of the image landscape and the circular universe mind, and the reason to pour the source, embodies Hee Choung Yi's work. The memorized memories, however, remain in the original form, and the traces of the past, sometimes shaking the mind, are mixed in the works. Through the oil paintings, he brings the familiarity and the unfamiliarity with a landscape that is floating in the screen beyond time and space. The work is largely divided into works that are reconstructed from traditional materials, folk paintings, and compositions that abstractly transform traditional materials and various symbols to form an organic screen. The former is a series of 'scenery scenes' in which the folk talent appeared since the 1980s, and the latter was introduced as a 'space' series in which his operational thinking was maximized. First, the series of 'Scenery of Landscape' is literally a landscape that flows through the mind. Among them, in the mountains and natural scenery, the artist debrisively weaves scenes that look like mountains, paddies, fields, or ground. In the frame separated as the division of the field of the field, various other memories and stories are created. In this screen composed of 'bricolage' of a kind, the folk materials with refined Korean emotion are prominent. These images, which are familiar to us, can be seen as a kind of "reincarnation" that was born in a new meaning after being buried in the past. These devices allow us to acquire familiarity in our consciousness and make it into an unreal space, which is different from the meaning of the past.

Likewise, the series of landscapes in which butterflies float in the background of deep blue light have also used devices that are familiar and have been transformed into unreal spaces. It is the blue color surrounding the front of the work. This distinctive color brings with it the intensity of folk color and the sense of bluishness that surrealist artists have used to experience the world of dreams and unconsciousness, which unrealistic space, dreamy space like dream world. Moreover, the drifting butterflies are emphasized at a greater rate than other icons, making the Zhujiajia 's Hujingjimou dream naturally reminiscent.

Carl Gustav Jung concluded that through the inquiry into human unconscious, the individual unconscious and the unconscious of the group can not be shared. The collective unconsciousness that flows through the heart of an individual is an unfamiliar emotion that is always at the root. In Hee Choung Yi's work, this is embodied in a myth, a story, and a folk story. In the end, the fragments of tradition that appeared in his works are not the records of the past but the process of understanding the unconscious sources existing in the modern world. Furthermore, the works of the "universe" series lead to a more comprehensive manifestation of these discussions.
, And his universal representations can be guessed as fragments of a circle that exist in the subject 's mind.

Based on the unconsciousness of Freud and Jung, anthropologist Claude Levi Strauss gave the totem, mythology, narrative, and folklore attributes as the most primitive form of humanity, 'wild thought', which can be encountered in the unconscious, . In Hee Choung Yi's 'Universe' series, we notice that traditional folktales and folk paintings expressed in previous series are universally found in other cultures. It is literally a primitive circle, elements that are based on the collective unconsciousness of mankind. In fact, the images of cosmic images and thunderstorms in his works are examples of Pueblo Indians in North America and magical icons associated with the Totem faith in many past peoples.

The system of unconscious circularity, primitive intellects, myths, and folk thought, flowing endlessly, is characterized by proliferation without clogging. The works of the Universe series are also infinitely proliferated or derived forms frequently appearing as unconscious expressions of infinite expansion. In the work, each image is filled with images, and the organism that seems to be continuous beyond the screen is more evident in the discussion of Shinichi Nakazawa, an anthropologist who described this "wild thought" as a Buddhist example. In Buddhism, there is an idea that looks at a world to a world of insignificance and matches the part and the whole. This space, in which the unconscious operation takes place without filtration, eventually leads to a pure space of unity and infinity. Shinichi Nakazawa said that the world of 'public', composed of a pure signifiant without a signifié, is the ultimate destination for this reason. From this point of view, the work emerges as an abstract cinematic of the mythical and totemic iconic examples, and tries to point out the universal circular formation system and infinite ways of thinking.
https://hisour.com/artist/hee-choung-yi/