The attempt to regard Hur Jin’s paintings as critical discourses about reality may have been motivated by some rampant perception of subject matters. Of course, Hu Jin tends to frown at his time driven mad by the delusion of power and wealth. And it is correct that he was determined to contain on his canvas all images captured in the net of such a viewpoint.
However, we need to take into consideration not only the attributes of his objects but also their handling, layout and contextualization. Anonymous Men-Modern 10 Longevity Symbols〉is a good example. Here, the symbols are dog, bowl, plastic container waste and sprayer.
The long yearning for eternity might have been replaced with the short-lived everyday consumables. It is in the same context that the human history dotted with rises and falls is overlapped indifferently with〈Animal Kingdom〉. Hur Jin’s figures who become more and more silhouettes or contours walk or run to some anonymous place, but their postures are all ambiguous with no sense of tension. Is the artist still invoking an escape from everyday life and present? Or does he dream of a flight from the earth being covered with dirty plastic containers?
Anyway, the iconography of human beings or the subjects of escape and flight looks slow than swift. The motions in〈Scud〉are slow quitely abnormally. Silhouettes wander or loiter slowly on the boundaries clearly divided by highlighted contours. In fact, Hur Jin’s figures always coexist on the ground of irony, and his past works where figures were treated as dead bodies were same.
Biologically speaking, he depicted men like mummies, but their details were full of ironies. A shade of death was cast over the upper eyelids, while the lips were thick enough to look avaricious. The skin was completely corrupted, while the lower belly was still bulging.
His(ARTIST HUR JIN,許塡,허진 작가,한국화가 허진,HUR JIN,허진 교수,허진 화백,A Painter HUR JIN) past paintings showed some ironic rhetoric that avarice amuses itself on the iconography of dying, or that an atmosphere of funeral coexists with the most shallow motive of life. The die was not cast.
△Shim Sang-yong(Art Critic)