ARTIST STATEMENT

Though my work has evolved through many different phases, a consistency exists. I have always found rejuvenation and renewal in nature and the landscape. Daily inspiration flows from the sight of a single flower to the majestic mountains and shores that surround me. Nature as God provided to us is the source of my joy in life. The works comprise my testimony to God. My amazement at his creation renews itself with the approach of each new season, with every new blossom and seed.

Equally inspirational to my work is my background. Born and raised in Korea, I began my formal art training in Seoul but completed it in the United States. Being uprooted from one’s homeland to be replanted on foreign soil does not equate a total loss or gain either way. It is a matter of taking and abandoning some choices. Bridging and integrating the gap between two such vastly different cultures has challenged and enriched me as an artist. In the ocean between the two societies I have found a wide and deep source of visions. By making art that incorporates the East and West, I have found immense fulfillment through the process of making art that truly reflects my unique experience as a person and an artist.

This push and pull between cultures manifests itself in the work. Abstraction and figuration, East and West, tradition and modernity: these tensions are re-created in my work through the use of varied visual tools and compositional structures found in both Eastern and Western art. The grids, scrims, patches of color, and symbols of the natural world that appear in my work necessarily do so in a fragmentary way, for they signify the spatial shifts of time involved in culling microcosmic glimpses of my daily experience.

   — Hei Myung C. Hyun