Haru K’s Delicious Landscape
By Kang Jennis Hyunsuk
There are several civic art museums in Gwangju. One of them, which has a beautiful garden, is located near the Seo-gu district office. It had once been used as the residence of the governor of Jeollanam-do. The move of the provincial office to Muan allowed the place to be open to Gwangju citizens as a museum. The name changed to the Ha Jung-woong Art Museum because Ha Jung-woong, a Korean-Japanese collector, donated a lot of world-class artworks to Gwangju.
Every year, the Ha Jung-woong Art Museum invites several competent artists and supports their exhibitions. A few years ago, when I visited the museum, I encountered some very interesting artworks. They were traditional Korean landscape paintings combined with unique scenes in them. For instance, a waterfall from the sky was expressed as long noodles from chopsticks. The various foods and snacks in the landscape paintings gave me a fun shock, and they have remained in my memory for a long time.
Luckily, I have had the opportunity to have an interview with Haru K, the artist of Delicious Landscape, for this issue of the Gwangju News. You too will be able to meet Haru K through the following interview.
Jennis: Thank you for your time. I saw one of your exhibitions a few years ago, and your artworks with Korean traditional landscapes matched some of my favorite foods. Patbingsu (red bean ice shavings) and the noodles were especially interesting. Before talking about your artworks, I’d like to ask you the meaning of your name. I think “Haru K” is not a common name in Korea, so I wonder if it has a special meaning.
Haru K: The “K” is an abbreviation of my surname “Kim,” and haru is the Korean word for “one day.” If I divide my life into units of time, I think a minute is too short, but a month or a year is too long. If I know how to live a good day, it could be the way to living a good life. So, I started using the name “Haru K” as self-encouragement to live more diligently day by day.
Jennis: You majored in oriental and Korean paintings at Hongik University in Seoul, a famous art school in Korea. I think your early paintings might be very different from those of today, what kind of paintings were they?
Haru K: At that time, I mainly painted rainy urban landscapes in ink. When I was an undergraduate, my mental state was a little unstable and depressed. I left my hometown at a young age and lived in the fiercely competitive city of Seoul. I worked part-time to pay my tuition, monthly rent, and to cover living expenses. After my part-time job, I went to school and did my homework. It left me feeling a contradiction in my life. I went to Seoul to do well in my artwork, but I didn’t have enough time to do it because I needed to work to survive. After finishing graduate school, I came back to Gwangju and started working again, step by step from the beginning.
Jennis: So, when did you start painting the Delicious Landscape series? I don’t think the series could have appeared all at once.
Haru K: My major was oriental paintings, and many people think traditional landscape paintings are for older people. So, I was thinking about how to express landscape paintings in my own way. I thought there should be a way for modern people to enjoy landscape paintings.
In the old days, people who wanted to depict Mother Nature had to make their landscape paintings develop. I think the old landscape paintings were telling stories about the ideal world that people of that age were imagining. Then, what could be the ideal world for modern people living in modern society far from Mother Nature? It would certainly not be easy for our lives in modern society to abandon the comforts of material satisfaction.
So, I wondered if I made a synthesis of objects representing natural landscapes and material goods expressing the virtues of capitalism, would not that be modern landscape painting? I thought that food, the basic unit of matter that a person needs to maintain life, might represent the material goods that symbolizes the beauty of modern society.
Around that time, a special exhibition was offered by a local food museum. I traveled to Hadong and the Hwagae old market that Seomjin River flows around and painted what I felt from the food trip. The exhibition gave me an opportunity to start the process of harmonizing natural landscapes and food that I had been thinking about. Since then, I have been working steadily to show the ideals of modern people who pursue both spiritual and material goods.
Jennis: In your early works of the Delicious Landscape series, I couldn’t see little humans who looked like Lego man. But you paint little humans climbing the ice wall of a patbingsu mountain in your latest works. It’s quite unique and interesting.
Haru K: Thank you. I thought it would be nice to have people enjoying the Delicious Landscape, so I make those little creatures appear these days.
Jennis: I remember that you went to Beijing for a residency. People say that China is the cradle of landscape paintings. So, I wonder what their reaction was to your landscape paintings.
Haru K: Food can be the subject of everyday life in any country. But it is unfamiliar to people for food, which is such a occurrence of daily life, to be the main subject in landscape paintings. When people see familiar objects turned into unfamiliar things, it gives them pleasure. So, I hope the visitors to my exhibitions in various countries have some fun.
Jennis: Please let me know what you’re up to these days and your plans for your next exhibitions.
Haru K: I haven’t been able to do overseas exhibition activities for nearly two years due to COVID-19, but I recently went to India. I was part of a three-Korean-artists exhibition with Lee Leenam and Yi Chong-nok.
Jennis: I wonder how the viewers at the exhibition responded in India.
Haru K: We were the first Korean artists to visit India since the beginning of the pandemic, so the Korean Embassy in India and the general manager of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in India also came to see the exhibition, and we got a lot of publicity from over 30 media outlets, including India’s state-run broadcaster. I thought that the citizens of the world who like K-pop have also become interested in Korean culture and art.
My solo exhibition on Jeju Island was through October 16, the Art Gwangju exhibition was also in October, the Damyang exhibition runs until November 5, a Singapore Art Fair is in November, and an exhibition is scheduled for Taiwan at the end of this year.
Jennis: You’ve had exhibitions in many countries around the world, and I think the subject you’re working with includes an infinite number of dishes in the world. What do you think is the direction of your future artworks?
Haru K: I will continue the Delicious Landscape series with variations of my new attempt to do paintings that are more representative of linguistic humor. For example, in the Ssi Bala series, little creatures work hard to pick seeds from pumpkins and watermelons. “Ssi bala” (씨 발라) means “picking seeds out of fruit” in Korean, but the expression also sounds a lot like a course Korean swear word.
Jennis: Oh, so it’s a pun on words. I felt that your Ssi Bala series was a type of resistance to something or someone. Because the word bala in Spanish means “bullet.”
Haru K: Wow, that’s interesting! I want to convey my message in paintings similar to the old poets’ poems satirizing the times, or like a rapper’s lyrics expressing the feelings of young people living in this era.
Linguistic paintings have actually existed for a long time. If you see the old Minhwa paintings, where tigers and magpies are depicted, you can also see pine trees, right? The magpie symbolizes “good news” in folk tales. Also, the Chinese character for pine tree is song (송/松) As you know, there are many different Chinese characters that have the same pronunciation. Another Chinese character pronounced “song” is the one meaning “send” (송/送). So, in the old days, people sent Minhwa as a New Year’s greeting, suggesting that they were “sending happy news.”
And the Korean word banhana (반하나, fall for someone) sounds similar to English banana (바나나). So, I incorporate the dual meaning in one of my linguistic paintings. Banana bwara (바나나 봐라, Look at the banana) sounds similar to Banhana bwara (반하나 봐라, See if I fall for you). I hope my paintings also convey happy greetings to their viewers.
Jennis: Oh, so Minhwa paintings are also like a language game as a riddle or a quiz.
Haru K: Yeah, I think my work is a process of taking classical stories and arranging them in a modern way. I think oriental paintings are shunned by the general public in modern society. Therefore, I think it is necessary to make efforts to convey the spirit and ideas of oriental paintings in an easy-to-understand way for modern people.
Jennis: What do you think is the spirit of oriental paintings?
Haru K: The ultimate goal of oriental paintings is to pursue the spirit of utopia in the paintings. However, I don’t think it’s right to classify oriental painting only by material characteristics.
Jennis: I don’t know why we’re dividing paintings into oriental and western paintings, but most people divide them based on the materials they use.
Haru K: Yes, that’s right. If Kim Hong-do, the famous artist of the Joseon Dynasty, lived in this age, he might have expressed his spiritual world in oil paint. So, the important factor that separates Eastern and Western paintings is not materials but the contents.
Jennis: What materials do you usually use when you paint?
Haru K: I use various materials, but I often use canvas or Korean traditional paper, hanji.
Jennis: I heard that your wife is also an artist. How did you meet Lim Hyun-chae, and what are the advantages of being an artist couple?
Haru K: I met her in 2012, when I was working at the Residency of the Gwangju Museum of Art. I think the advantages of married artists are that we can talk about each other’s artworks and understand each other’s lives.
Jennis: Thank you for your time for this interesting interview!
After the Interview…
Learning about Haru K’s Delicious Landscape series was a pleasant food trip for me. I am sure many people will also love his paintings with the imaginative messages the little creatures in his paintings send to us. Why don’t you try to discover the messages in Haru K’s Delicious Landscape.
Photographs courtesy of Haru K.
Haru K’s Profile
Solo Exhibitions
- 2022 Dining Scenery, Art Space House, Gwangju
- 2022 Delicious Food Travel, Cheongju Art Studio, Cheongju
- 2019 Weird Gourmet, GMA Ha Jung-woong Museum of Art
- 2018 Landscape Collection and Editing, Soohoh Gallery
- 2017 Stroll Around the Landscape, Gallery Riche, Gwangju
- 2016 Delicious Landscape, Kiss Gallery
- 2015 Delicious Landscape, Shinsegae Gallery, Gwangju
- 2014 One Day, Traditional Folk Food Museum, Gwangju
- 2013 Delicious Landscape, GMA Gallery, Seoul
- 2010 Object, Kumho Gallery, Gwangju
- 2009 Haru’s Memory, Gallery M, Seoul
- 2007 Live in the City, Kwanhoon Gallery, Seoul
Main Collections
MMCA-Artbank, Samsung Electronics, ETRO, Gwangju Museum of Art, Gwangju City Hall, Gwangju Seo-gu District Office, Seongnam Cultural Foundation, Shinsegae Department Store, Young-mu Engineering and Construction, Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology, Shinsung FA
The Interviewer
Jennis Kang has been living in Gwangju all her life. She has been painting in oil paints for almost a decade, and she learned that there are a lot of fabulous artists in this city of the arts. As a freelance interpreter, she wants to introduce Gwangju’s wonderful artists to the world.