Exhibition Information

연도미상 (출처= 경남도립미술관) 36×52cm

연도미상 (출처= 경남도립미술관) 67×55cm

1950년대 (출처= 경남도립미술관) 20×28cm

1953년 (출처= 경남도립미술관) 50×65cm

			"I paint like I am writing a fairy tale. It's like a contradiction where you are forced to laugh while being beaten and enjoy it happily in the face of hardship......."

- From the memoir of Yang Dalsuk(1975)

 

What is the relationship between politics and power, history and art? In what ways have noise from different times worked in our lives? These questions allow us to reflect on our lives and history. Korea's modern and contemporary history occasionally awakens our anger under extreme and bizarre circumstances. Art in such cases has existed so.

 

Yeosan Yang Dalsuk was born in 1908 and lived through the ups and downs of modern Korean history. Japanese colonial era, liberation space, war, divided nations, and powerful ideological regimes. Our 20th-century, when dying and living were the priority, made everyone's lives miserable and hard under such a contradictory and oppressed system.

What was the life like of Yeosan, who lived as a full-time painter and a breadwinner of seven families? Can we, living in the most advanced of capitalism in the 21st century, understand all those emotions?

 

"Yeosan" is a pen-name of Yang Dalsuk. The artist's explanation of "the hazy and dusky mountain at dawn" can again be inferred from his life, the background of the times, and the values he wanted to include in his work. Cattle and shepherd, paradise and the world of innocent childhood, fairy tales and folk artist, these words, which represented Yeosan, correspond to the formative aesthetics of his work. However, if you look deeper into his work, you can feel the new aspects of Yeosan.

 

In fact, from Yeosan's works before the 1950s, we can feel a nonviolent resistance of an artist. The gray, dark, and sorrowful atmosphere of rural areas, the lives of ordinary people who showed their hardships, or rather the strong appearance of farmers, the artist wanted to capture the hope of a new world in the lives of ordinary people. Like that, the aspects and new hopes of Korean society expressed by Yeosan contained the strong social consciousness of the artist in such a gloomy era.

However, this social consciousness of Yeosan is rarely found in works after the late 1950s, when he was enjoying drawing the cattle and shepherd. Or it is known so. Children, nature, and idyllic rural landscapes, usually found in works of this period, are often interpreted as a new paradise, a world of innocence. Then, is such paradise irrelevant to the hope of a new world that wanted to go beyond the grim age?

The testimonies of Yeosan's bereaved family and painter friends, the artist's memoirs, and contributions clear up such questions. In addition, when he enjoyed drawing cattle and shepherd, it was found that he also worked on that has critical of the miserable social situation. Then what should we see in his diverse works?

 

Blueish landscapes of daily life, farmers with strong energy, ordinary people in the dark period, cattle and little children running in painless paradise, this metaphor other meanings. His vari3ous painting styles and hidden metaphors, which are not well-known, suggest the artist's view of the sad social reality, his social desire to go beyond it, and his willingness to express it truly.

In the end, the artist was continuously expressing his admiration for a new world beyond the dark age, like the hazy hope of tomorrow, which came after the dawn clearing the dark night. Through the life and art of Yeosan Yang Dalsuk, I hope you can feel his strong message toward society and think about the oppression and power of the times, art, and the life of the artist under it.