Korean artist Min Hye Won is gaining attention for her ‘mind-scapes (心象風景)’, which reflect emotions in landscapes using human emotions as the subject matter of her unique landscapes. Regarding “Mind Landscapes 2023(心象風景),” Min Hye Won explains that “mind landscapes” are “places of the mind” that reflect emotions in landscapes.
Places are intertwined with natural objects, such as seasonal changes, wind, temperature, and tactile synesthetic elements, to express the emotional state at that time and to elicit empathy from the audience.
The landscapes that the artist paints are not landscapes that depict places, but rather landscapes that reconstruct the emotions and state of mind felt.
Min Hye Won says that the subject matter of her work is not a wondrous natural landscape, but an ordinary landscape like a walking path. She says that her work begins with a small discovery in an everyday space, and reinterprets it into various natural spaces according to the flow of the season and the artist's psychological state. In order to highlight special emotions felt in ordinary places, Min intentionally expands ordinary places into a spectrum of various emotions and subjectively expresses them as mysterious unknown places that do not exist in reality with bold colors and dramatic expression.
Min Hye Won, who majored in Korean painting, sketches with ink on uncoated hanji or uncoated jute. The expression of ink faintly spread on the surface is reminiscent of the ink wash of oriental painting, and this spread of ink on kanji creates the artist's unique dreamlike painting style. Min uses acrylic gouache on top of her ink drawings to layer multiple colors, and the overlapping layers capture deep color tone and textures. MMin Hye Won graduated from Dongguk University majoring Korean Painting and has had three solo exhibitions and various group exhibitions at the Gyeonggi Cultural Foundation, Seongnam Arts Center Cube Art Museum, and more.