Kwon Young-Woo

Kwon Young-Woo’s works explore the relationship between traditional materials and abstractexpression in the spirit of Dansaekhwa. Trained in traditional Chinese ink painting, Kwon builtbridges through his art between Korea’s avant-garde and Western movement of AbstractExpressionism. He switched over to working with the medium of hanji Korean mulberry paperduring the early 1960s and experimented with its dimensional limits by using his fingers topuncture and scratch thin sheets, then by gluing the layers in multiple laminated stacks ofvarying thickness to produce three-dimensional relief sculptures. The details of the dynamicthree-dimensional forms are all random, creating shadows that are unique by eachmanipulation. When the viewer takes in his works as a sum of its parts, there is an underlyingsense of control to his manipulations that appears extremely well coordinated. In later works,Kwon would apply small amounts onto the torn edges of his works and allow it to seep into thepaper over time.