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Snow Day Conversation

Today, I want talk about cultral effect on modern day paintings.

First, there is three major culture in Asian Art, historically, China, Korea, and Japan.
I just want to talk about this as a one of the artist point of view not as art historian
or historical fact.
I think Chinese art is huge in scale and somewhat symbolistic because of their character,
if you think about the great wall or millions of Buddist statues, you can easily see
the scale and persistant mentality,
If you look at Japanese paintings, you can see how decorative and something very
distinguished style that gives a lot of impact on some of the impressionist paintings.

Korea, however, was in the middle of these two different culture, more affected by
China than Japan long time ago, has been establishing it's own culture slowly,
Korea was able to create it's own art culture from as early as 3 AD to 19 Centry.
Korea has completely different art, however, if you compare with China or Japan.
Korea has historically beatiful line drawings stemming from it's Buddist religion,
meaning endless forgiveness or desire for something unachievable situation.

If you observe some of Korea's best sculptures like Shinla's Buddist face or
some of the stone carved architecture from old temples or paintings,
there is somthing else going on..."the balanced beauty"
It is not huge in scale and it's not brilliantly decorative but....there is a beauty.
The balanced beauty is what we are constantly looking for...it's desirable art form.
We are always looking for some new art either from abstract form or figurative form.
But, the mentality for this true art was always there from the beginning.

And I believe I can show that cultral or mental effect in my painting, not by just one
painting but with many paintings over long period.


New Port Harbor Sunset

New Port Harbor is a very beautful village that has a lot of restaurants and shops and boats.

This place is maybe one of the most attractive town ever visited, because it has almost everything

we are looking for...first endless shops and restaurants seems to open all day all night, and a lot of

seafood restaurant along the beach, and this place is also famous for spectacular hillside coast that

has a lot of summer vacation homes that is also pretty old, including JFK summer house.

I really enjoy this neighborhood whenever I visit here, onetime, I boarded cruise boat that circles

around the coast and I could observe a lot of sight seeings with sea breeze.

I don't usually paint scenes exactly what I see, all these positive feelings and inspirations are accumulated

 to my mind, and what I ususally do is  constantly looking for something close to what I want to remember as symbol

of this beautiful place, but ..the reality is I do not find anything close to what I am thinking in the beginning.

But one lucky day, some inspiration cross my mind very quickly, then I find that place immediatly,

I start to paint extremely fast...Music is helping me a lot to create a beautiful piece of painting also.

I want make a point... as to how I usaully start paint, I do not like set up a scene or make a setting for painting.

I only like natural scenes, or our daily life as I see, and I would make big deal out of it.


Approaching Broadway


When I was much younger, our brothers and sisters use to talk about Broadway, Manhattan.

The image of New York city at that time was like a dream or almost like a heavenly place

not only because of our economic level, but also we generally had a lot of positive dream

about America, we talked about how durable American car is and how big it is and we

used to compare to alien UFO ships( maybe it was 1950's Cadillac) and we talked about

how good Elvis Presley and Ann Margaret is also.

There was disappointment when I arrived in New York city in late 1980's...

The city was already becoming aged and city was not clean at all.

and then I had a lot of hardship adjusting my lifestyle..., economically and mentally..

Those hardship made me only stronger and helped developing my paintings over the

longtime period.

Now, I appreciate the city I live around not just for the great architectural buildings, also for

the beautiful people and cozy restaurant, museums and shops, and I realize that

this broadway is getting back the old glory itself.