▲ 花落香留, 130×130㎝ Acrylic on canvas, 2016

 

This is a first impression of recent works of the artist Bul-Ae Son Dong-Jun(不涯 孫東俊). The screen with several repeated simple musical melodies presents a unique visual characteristic by meeting the appropriate blank space. Son Dong-Jun’s strokes have a rough and bold dynamic nature. It seems that his art connotes all desires and passions of life with the aesthetic of movement in calmness. If so, is Son Dong-Jun’s work calligraphy or painting? Actually, the question is not important, because as a person’s birthplace is unchangeable, so Bul-Ae Son Dong-Jun is a calligrapher from his birth.

 

▲ 200×140㎝, 2016

 

Son Dong-Jun lived with his grandparents from when he was adopted into his eldest uncle’s family at an early age. Because his grandfather was running a private calligraphy institute, Son naturally learned written Chinese and calligraphy and in the third year of middle school he met his first calligraphy teacher Chang-Seok Kim Chang-Dong(菖石 金昌東). Since then he continually drew attention as a calligraphy scholarship student. When he was in his teens, he received a grand prix or a first prize fifteen times at grand student calligraphy competitions in the middle and high school fields. During his military service he worked as a scribe in writing official letters and documents. He majored in calligraphy at the university. After getting married to one of his calligraphy students, he went to China to study calligraphy further. His life itself is the destiny of a calligrapher.

 

▲ 38×100㎝, 2010

 

In high school, Son Dong-Jun’s nickname was “Calligraphy Dictionary.” Because he studied Chinese literature from his childhood, he could write, without a calligraphy dictionary, the whole text of Tao Yuan Ming’s (陶淵明, 365~427) Returning Home to the Country (歸去來辭) with the Dang dynasty calligrapher Yan Zhen Qing(顔眞卿, 709~785)’s regular script. Furthermore he knows where Chinese characters are in a calligraphy lexicon, by both book and page. Also he memorized the information about Korean calligraphers at that time: where they were from, when they were born, and even their characteristics.

 

▲ 140×170㎝, 2013

 

Finally with the recommendation of his high school homeroom teacher, he entered Wonkwang University’s Department of Calligraphy which was the first one founded in Korea. He entered the university with a perfect score on the calligraphy test and in the university he was like a “fish in the water.” When he looks back at the past, he says that the most affluent time in his life was when he was at the university because because he was able to pay all of his living expenses with the prize money from calligraphy competitions. As to beginning the life of a calligrapher, receiving a prize at a calligraphy competition in his first year at the university was the most decisive event to Bul-Ae Son Dong-Jun. He received the first prize at the sixth National Calligraphy Competition which was co-hosted by KBS and the National Calligraphy League and was conducted by Yeo-Cho Kim Eung-Hyeon(如初 金膺顯, 1927~2007) who was one of the greatest figures in Korean calligraphy.

 

▲ 100×60㎝, 2015

 

Because this competition is the most authoritative calligraphy competition in Korea, the fact that a freshman in university made his official debut as a calligrapher there was significant news. One episode related to this competition is that one of the staff misunderstood Son Dong-Jun to be an student assistant of the event and made him late for the award ceremony by giving him work to do. This episode gives a clear impression of how people perceived him. After that, beginning with being awarded the prize at the Grand Art Exhibition of Korea, he made remarkable success, at various competitions, including receiving the grand prix at the Monthly Calligraphy Competition in 2004 and the First Calligraphy Culture Competition in 2005, and he continued his passion as a young calligrapher.

△Kim Yoon-Sup(Chief of Korean Arts Management Institute and Ph.D. in art history)

 

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