THE AGE OF MELANCHOLY IN MEINEN...
A. Dürer’s approach in bringing melancholy in “Melancholia (1514)” as an artistic projection of feelings has made us encounter a large number of melancholic portrait images from an angel deeply in thought, to geniuses, artists, and to philosophers. Do we remember the last time we were in a melancholy mood? Feeling of helplessness, lack of energy, fatigue, sadness and vainness compose a mood of melancholy. Back then in the times of Dürer melancholy was only permitted to those with particular jobs, but now it has its general influence on everyone in today’s world.Jin-A Ryou’s portraits display people with feeling of melancholy in a very unique way. With a minimum margin, people are expressionless, yet surprisingly enough, the medium is revealing their emotions. Watercolors run down the papers seeming it was not done on purpose, and smudged colors let us read their inner feelings of melancholy, great sadness, and sympathy. It is supposable that these meaning-related media has helped Jin-A Ryou to expose without any trick people’s bare faces and straightforwardly open inner sides. And on the other hand, it proves that she practices experimental traditions of contemporary art. Generally speaking, a medium to be the main idea is the essential element of formality and medium being palyed up for the first time in the period of modernism.
Those run-down colors resemble real life in a way that it is a mixture of meaningful behaviors and uncontrollable phenomenons. With this unique style of her works she captures images of today’s ordinary people around us. In 2003 she completed <50 portraits of helplessness> in which she focused on catching each person’s moment of perceiving one’s own world in various viewpoints. Then after coming back to Korea in 2010, her latest artworks obtain much darker aura of melancholy of a big city of Seoul to those people met outside on streets. Although the artworks shout a feeling of melancholy, Jin-A Ryou’s warm gaze turn them looking beautifully sophisticated for she even hugged the unmentioned scars of sorrow in the people. She has been explaining that her motive of portrait works come simply from interest towards humanity. Greatest happiness and deepest sorrow both emerge from human beings and that is the message in her portraits.
Now it is time for us to confront these portraits as well as our own reflections on the canvas. Viewers and people in artworks overlap in a way that they both are gazing in a distance. It is as if her created imagery in
Prof. Yoo, Hun Joo
Yonsei University Dept. of German Language & Literature, Seoul