Donghyun Son Travelers among mountains and streams, 2023

Donghyun Son’s painting is from a series of unique works drawing on a famous historical work, Fan Kuan’s Travelers Among Mountains and Streams from the Song Dynasty, dated around to the early 11th century. Each panel in the ten-piece series takes a motif from the composition and re-imagines it in a novel painting technique, in effect deconstructing a classical masterwork and reimagining sections in a modern painterly idiom. For the individual panels in Travelers among Mountains and Streams, the artist used a variety of materials, such as inkstone ink, western ink, acrylic ink, rubbing ink but also employed everyday objects such as children’s toys, spray bottles, and stencils as tools in an improvised painterly process.

Each panel utilizes a distinct material and technique, often with specific associations. This work uses crumpled paper sprayed with ink to depict the texture of mountains and rocks and acrylic ink applied through the back using the Baechae technique (a traditional Korean painting technique where ink is slowly applied from the back of the paper or fabric to create subtle color effects and a smooth surface).

Donghyun Son’s practice has long focused on combining a broad range of pictorial languages and compositions, creating juxtapositions between the visual idioms of manga, comics, and graffiti, and historical iconography such as courtly portraits, hanging scrolls or multi-part screens. Son first began taking sections and fragments from a classical work from East Asian painting and reinterpreting them through contemporary drawing and writing techniques in 2020 with his work Early Spring, based on the eponymous early 11th century landscape painting by Guo Xi.