Anyone who has seen So Sung Hyo’s Vietnam-era artwork will immediately associate the country’s top official and household name with the Vietnam War. He was the single painter most often referred to at the time as the artist responsible for the anti-war mayflies.
Through more than 30 years of “pagoda painting,” Sunghyo has demonstrated a revolutionary and encyclopedic knowledge of the art scene in Korea during colonial and communist rule and in Vietnam at the time.
“The history of war in Korea, we thought it was the Vietnam War, because that’s the war they talk about. It wasn’t the war in the Korean War,” said Paeng Son-hui, a professor of Korean art at Peking University.
“(But) So Sung-hyo lived in the 1950s, so why does he only know so much about the Vietnam War? He was in the right place at the right time,” Son Hui told CNN.
In the 1950s, the interconnected world of Korean modern art grew around Sung-hyo. The early postwar period was defined by big-name artists such as Kim Tae-woo and Kim Young-tae and young scholars such as Sun Hee. Sunghyo was born around 1943 and was probably one of the earliest members of the movement.
That generation still defines Korean art today. Even Sunhyo acknowledges that today, the emergence of young artists who were not born or not yet in school until after the 1970s may have a very different view of the relationship between art and political understanding.
“A generation will come and our art will be completely different from the previous generation,” he says.
Helen Sachsensky/Yale Griffin
Sunghyo’s paintings of Vietnamese generals reflect his appreciation of different art forms and their philosophies of domination and submission. Despite his focus on authority, the painter, now in his early 80s, has never studied traditional methods for his work.
“He is part of the tradition of Korean movement history,” Son-hui says. “In his case, he found a tradition of mixed art in China and Korea: mystical art, hallucinogenic art, and all kinds of strange art. He developed a habit of using these novel art forms to understand society and its people.”
The artist’s artistic roots extend far beyond his wartime studies. Although Japanese colonists introduced music, painting and ceramics to Korea during the Japanese occupation from 1910 to 1945, Korea continued to collect its own poetic figurative paintings during the Korean War.
The loss of these traditions during the colonial era after the end of Japanese rule in 1945 led Sung-hyo to see the dual power of Korean traditional art and new artistic methods as the path to the highest cultural and social achievement.
Through his years of artistic creation, So Sung-hyo also contributed a large number of artworks to the Korean government and society. Between 1956 and 1958, he participated in a short-lived Korean art movement with Sun Hee and Kim Tae-woo.
Their paintings conveyed Mao Zedong’s ideas of a new China, reinforcing the notion of Korean nationalism in the late 1950s. They also portrayed Korean history as a closed, ritualistic past and helped avoid sharing material and perspectives from traditional Korean kings and civil war narratives.
Early 20th century views of the Soviet Union and revolutionary art movements-such as William Blake’s “Romanticism of the Absurd”-were disseminated to new Korean audiences through Sunhyo’s paintings. audience. Although there were few Korean scholars at the time, they also brought a particular approach to modern art: the search for tools useful in defining contemporary identity.
After 1958, the history of modern Korean art would continue to turn to Sunghyo’s postwar paintings to define ideas of social expression.
“The tradition of painting grew old with the generations. In the 1990s, it became a tradition of ‘postmodern art,'” says Paeng Son-hui. “So it has become part of the history of modern Korean art.”
