We had the good fortune of connecting with Hyunhee Doh and we’ve shared our conversation below.
Hi Hyunhee, can you walk us through the thought-process of starting your business?
Art is a good method to re-perceive the moments in life. Through art, I share the perspectives that I recreated in personal aspect.
My artwork is the lens that reflects the most subtle part of life and question the depth of time.
When I first started painting, it was an action to answer the question ‘how can we embrace the time we live in?’
As of the moment I regarded art as a method to reflect a stance of living, I began to identify the perspective of living and creating narratives within the artworks the same.
These days, we experience too many things in the same time. We automatically achieve easy-access to numerous and anonymous information and images, which invades the moments we actually perceive and experience. It’s hard to solely live the original scene captured in our own senses. Everything is fast and easy that we get used to living in an overly accessible indirect perspectives and builds up the complexity in direct experience. The excessive overload of direct/in-direct experience creates stack of layers on top of our living moments.
In this kind of era, it is a huge risk to take a slow-tense and avoid being a part of the fast wave. However, we sometimes need to take a risk. Choosing to break down our perspective is what we need to notice as an option of lifestyle to sustain the originality of ourselves.
As an artist, I keep breaking down the layers of daily-life moments and rebuilt them with the senses of our own.
Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
My art is an actual, and metaphoric container of time. The scenes read through five senses – hear, smell, touch, taste, see – build up in a form of the numerous layers on the picture plane.
I metaphor every layer of subtle color and shade as a short moment in time. When I create one layer of shade on top of hanji – Korean traditional paper – surface, I take a half to one full day to complete this layer. The process is to soak wet the hanji with a subtle amount of shade, mingle in the physical wrinkles and painted wrinkles, and fully dry under the sunlight. This way, the artwork adds up its narrative little by little, everyday. Time element is not only a content but is an actual layer in my artworks.
In a result, the finished artwork earns a slow-paced narratives. They reveal the time they absorbed in the work surface slowly and quietly to the viewers so it will take more than just a glance to see the full story. I wish people could see the flow of layers that I stacked to make one piece of artwork, traveling through their own flow of time and moments.
Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
There is a place in my hometown that conveys the thickest layer of time, but still, always has a new face. It is a lakeside park not too far from my family house.
I lived in many cities. New York, Chicago, a few cities in South Korea… But my old hometown in South Korea is where I feel the most core self and always exciting to spend time with beloved people. Especially, this lakeside park is a place where I spend a lot of time when I need to recharge myself for new works.
The reflection this lake creates is different everyday, in every season. It has variety of faces, embracing the shadow of people who walks around the lake very quietly. Small waves mingle up the shadows of birds, trees, dogs and people when they are about to go away. They cause the slight distraction to the shape of shadows and mix up the ones that are disappearing and other ones which emerges newly. When I catch that moment, it strongly touches the memory of when I connect to both past and present narratives for a very short time. This special slot of time perishes as the new wave comes in, as the narratives in my picture plane keep catching the edge of flow in time.
Walking around this lake offers the most peace to mind and fresh notice to ordinary things. If I had my best friend over to my hometown city, I would spend time together at the lakeside park every morning, discovering a new face of the reflections the lake reveals.
Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
There are numbers of people who dedicated their genuine support to me. But among all those people, my family has been the greatest supporter. More than any other people, they have always been emotionally in a close distance, and deeply looked into what I try to say through arts. Their strong belief and heartwarming love held me to sustain myself to purely stay myself.
They are always on my side, fully interested in my language of art, and excited about the career path as every single step I walked through. Time to time, being an artist could be a tough and lonely journey. As so, I feel more and more blessed to be a daughter to my parents, sibling to my sister, and a granddaughter to my grandparents.
Website: www.hyunheedoh.com
Instagram: @h.d.artis