Ko Young-Hoon, who paints surprisingly hyper-realistic images, tries to make reality through painting. The dichotomous boundary between the real and the illusion seen in This is Not a Pipe by René Magritte had a strong influence on Ko’s views of art. Ko completely refuted Magritte’s view that the image is merely a significant and that an image without the signified is merely illusion. To Ko, the image is an illusion, but at the same time is real. Furthermore, the image positioned as a representation is sensuous, and does not require linguistic elements in order to be comprehended. Attempting only to embody the real through visual depiction, artist Ko completes his work through realistic representation. Though he embodied illusions close to the real by arranging heterogeneous subject matter such as flowers, feathers and stones on books in the earlier years of his career, later he included the variability of the objects in an attempt to represent the reality itself. To this end, he gave change to the focal points in the work, or portrayed objects and shadows simultaneously in an empty background, thus emphasising the change of objects according to spaces. Ko Young-Hoon continues his experiments to expand the significance of painting, endeavouring to transcend the limits of representation through the act of erasing the boundary between illusion and reality.
