Hooranky Bae 후랭키배

Artist’s note

Drawing the Signs of Memory

The image of a rising moment is drawn with rhythmic forms and colours until it resolves into a harmonious painting. The motif of each work is image data — memory — floating inside the artist: thoughts of each moment, or things that come to mind in response to the world outside. Data recorded long ago recur again and again, yet the combination is different every time. Its elements are colour, texture, shape, balance, beat and feeling.

“Art is the essence of knowledge,” says Hooranky. Human beings remember the first images they encounter from birth and try to imitate them — and there, human intellectual behaviour begins. The need for knowledge lies in sharing: without empathising and talking with one another, life can only be vaguely imagined. Hooranky’s philosophy of art begins here.

The aim is to draw out images from the memory of the artist’s original sensibility and balance them as far as possible so that they fit together. First, balance must be achieved in the dialogue on the canvas; otherwise one cannot expect to interact with the audience. It is as if the sounds of different instruments, none of which knows the tune, were brought into harmony by an orchestra.

When viewers meet a fragment of an image — a minimum of recognition — they feel the excitement of an instinctive memory coming to mind. If these images are in harmony, whether dynamic, serene, or elegant and beautiful, the viewer becomes more and more immersed in a dialogue with themselves. Such a conversation cannot begin without images in which memories — knowledge — are shared. Hooranky finds such images in his memory and draws them digitally.

Art is a promised signal we send to one another — a protocol that stirs emotion within the ecosystem.— from the artist’s note

In the world of Hooranky’s art, we meet the chance to feel anew, and interpret again, the memory of fixed images — shape, colour, feeling, sound, rhythm, melody, movement.