Walking Between Nature and Humanity, Time and Memory
Huh Myoungwook has long explored the traces that time leaves on matter, accumulating colors drawn from the sensations of a single day through ottchil (Korean lacquer) and a repetitive process of labor. In his work, color never remains in a finished state. Through the cycle of applying, drying, sanding, and layering again, color deepens and transforms, and even after a work leaves the artist’s hands, it continues to hold time as it meets light, air, and nature.
“Time itself becomes the material that makes color.”
In his work, “between” is not a mere boundary. Between one color and another, between accumulation and erasure, between revealing and concealing, different times meet and overlap. The time made by human hands, the time in which matter transforms on its own, and the time in which nature intervenes in the work flow at different speeds across a single surface. The exhibition Between views Huh Myoungwook’s practice through this lens of the “in-between.” Rather than completing or mastering time, the artist waits, observes, sometimes intervenes, and sometimes steps back. He makes room for nature to shape part of the work and accepts the time that matter needs to change on its own.
“For Huh Myoungwook, then, an artist is not one who masters time, but one who recognizes the moment when different times meet. He waits for the time it takes lacquer to change, watches the traces nature leaves behind, intervenes when the moment comes, and at times withdraws. His making becomes less an act of completing a form than a matter of creating the conditions in which different times can meet.”
In this way, Huh Myoungwook’s work becomes not a single finished result but a process in which different times and sensations overlap. At the threshold where color and matter, humanity and nature, memory and the present meet, his work continues to change even now.
— Shim Eunlok, art critic
Huh Myoungwook has long explored the traces that time leaves on matter, accumulating colors drawn from the sensations of a single day through ottchil (Korean lacquer) and a repetitive process of labor. In his work, color never remains in a finished state. Through the cycle of applying, drying, sanding, and layering again, color deepens and transforms, and even after a work leaves the artist’s hands, it continues to hold time as it meets light, air, and nature.
“Time itself becomes the material that makes color.”
In his work, “between” is not a mere boundary. Between one color and another, between accumulation and erasure, between revealing and concealing, different times meet and overlap. The time made by human hands, the time in which matter transforms on its own, and the time in which nature intervenes in the work flow at different speeds across a single surface. The exhibition Between views Huh Myoungwook’s practice through this lens of the “in-between.” Rather than completing or mastering time, the artist waits, observes, sometimes intervenes, and sometimes steps back. He makes room for nature to shape part of the work and accepts the time that matter needs to change on its own.
“For Huh Myoungwook, then, an artist is not one who masters time, but one who recognizes the moment when different times meet. He waits for the time it takes lacquer to change, watches the traces nature leaves behind, intervenes when the moment comes, and at times withdraws. His making becomes less an act of completing a form than a matter of creating the conditions in which different times can meet.”
In this way, Huh Myoungwook’s work becomes not a single finished result but a process in which different times and sensations overlap. At the threshold where color and matter, humanity and nature, memory and the present meet, his work continues to change even now.
— Shim Eunlok, art critic
