There are no words for “Wonkyung(原景)” or “Wonkyung(原境)” in our language. They’re just words I made up. The Chinese character “Won(原)” here means to inquire into the original nature of something. The earliest use is by Han Yu (768-824) in the Tang Dynasty in his famous “Yuandao”, and the closest is by Feng Youlan (1895-1990) in his “Xinyuanren”. Thus, “Yuandao” means to inquire into the nature of the Dao, and “Xinyuanren” means to examine the nature of Man himself.

I see Ha Jihoon (河芝勳, 1978-)’s art in two ways. One is to ask the essence of landscape painting with the original landscape, and the other is to dig into the landscape with the original landscape. Inquiring into the nature of the landscape is an inquiry into human perception, while exploring the boundaries of the landscape means establishing the possibilities and limits of human progress in the symbolic language of painting.

Ha Jihoon studied at the University of Münster, Germany, under the guidance of Michael van Ofen (1956-), a master of contemporary painting. Michael van Ofen leaves only the essence of the landscape. It is a representation of a world beyond perception. It is a way of fleshing out a landscape until it becomes an abstraction, building only its essence, its bones. This is the methodology of the technical term ‘crop’, which usually means to cut out (part of) a photo or painting. It starts with a philosophical idea to go beyond our immediate perception of things, or any other physical perception. Perception is a human sense. It is, in turn, limited to human vision. Human vision is absolutely influenced by human temperament.

We remember the problem of the painter’s style, which Ernst Gombrich (1909-2001) analyzed in “The Limit of Likeness.” It is not my eyes that look at the landscape, but my temperament. There is no such thing as visual accuracy, and there is no such thing as objective vision. Even a sophisticated camera can’t be objective. It is trapped by the limitations of the camera’s inherent program.

Michael van Ofen’s landscape paintings are extremely refined, minimized to the bare bones of the landscape. This is similar to the style of the old East Asian masters Mi Fu (1051-1107) and Shen Zhou (1427-1509), who stripped their paintings down to their essence. Just as Mi Fu and Shen Zhou reduced the essence of the landscape to a minimal form and gave it a poetic quality, Michael van Oppen infused his work with philosophical thought.

In philosophy, the former is called realism, and the latter is called representationalism. Michael van Ofen believed that the truth lies somewhere between realism and representationalism. The landscape we see is both real and subject to our temperament. In order to overcome these two axes, he stripped things down to their light and structure (bones).

While Michael van Ofen sees the essence of landscape as the minimization of human temperament, Ha Jihoon concludes that the essence of landscape is the construction of structure. In his Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Rouen series, Claude Monet (1840-1926) defined the essence of landscape as the change of light and repeatedly painted the same spot at different times. Here, Monet revealed the ever-changing beauty of light. Ha Jihoon, on the other hand, presents a method of superimposing landscapes that change with light and other conditions at many different times of day on a single screen. Therefore, Ha Jihoon asks differently. Man (the painter) does not paint what he sees, but he sees what he can paint. Thus, Friedrich W. Nietzsche (1844-1900) says:

“All Nature faithfully”—But by what feint Can Nature be subdue to art’s constraint? Her smallest fragment is still infinite! And so he paints but what he likes in it. What does he like? He likes, what he can paint!” ¹⁾

What does Ha Jihoon love? Existence itself. But Ha Jihoon is not a realist, nor is he a mere believer of representationalism. For him, existence is a totality of perception, sensitivity, and poetry that moves nonstop in a thousand variations in the relationship between objects and objects, and between people and the outside world. The existence that Ha Jihoon sees is not distinguished by perception, nor can it be known by knowledge. Like the dialog between Huizi and Zhuangzi in the Zhuangzi (莊子)’s “The Floods of Autumn (秋水)” chapter, Ha Jihoon thoroughly believes in Zhuangzi’s opinion. Huizi treats fish as knowledge and thus denies that they are enjoyable. Zhuangzi treats the fish as a poetic whole, and thus participates in its unbridled enjoyment. ²⁾

Ha Jihoon’s landscapes are neither constructivist, where the structure of the mountains is meticulously built, nor are they representations for representation’s sake. It is a consistent will to present a new pictorial language by infusing the canvas with the mystery that comes to us differently every hour and looks different depending on the viewing conditions, our life experience that is felt holistically in response to existence.

Lee Jin Myoung, Art Critic and PhD in Philosophy

¹⁾ Ernst Gombrich, “The Limit of Likeness,” in Aesthetics, (ed.) David Goldblatt(London, Routledge, 2017), p 12.

²⁾ 『莊子』外篇 ｢秋水｣15: Huizi asked Zhuangzi: “Zhuangzi, you’re not even a fish, so how do you know the pleasures of fish?” Zhuangzi replied, “You’re not me, so how do you know I know the pleasures of fish? “You are not me, so how do you know whether I know the pleasures of fish or not?”