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, 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 eiter 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.

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.