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Young Taek Park (Kyonggi University Professor & Art Critic), 

 

Qwaya is a penname. There are some artists who use pennames or stage names in lieu of their given names. In the East, there were names called ho (호, 號) to refer to someone in a familiar way. Calligraphers and painters were usually referred to by ho, or what can be called pennames. A ho reflects one’s wish, purpose, and will. The pennames we are well aware of are Gyeomjae, Danwon, Hyewon, and Chusa. Kim Jeong-hui is known to have had as many as 503 ho, or pennames.

 

Qwaya is said to have referred to ‘night speculation’. In Qwaya’s paintings, there are many scenes suggestive of night. Dark, deep blue is applied to the inside of a square window frame, shining stars frequently emerge as yellow round masses, or a little lighting fixture gently illuminates a room. Blue and yellow are typical of Qwaya’s palette. The hues feel softly wet like artificial lighting. These subdued shades of blue and yellow give his paintings an emotion and mood. Pastel tones give his paintings a romantic, lyric, and emotional feeling. The reason why Qwaya’s paintings have an appeal to the general public is their comfortable, warm emotions and easy, kind accounts. I see a young man’s portrait, which seems to be Qwaya’s self-portrait. It was used for the Korean indie rock band Jannabi’s second album Legend, and considerably effective in terms of color and atmosphere. Its form looks unstable while its sense of color is conspicuous. His use of stark color contrast between intense blue and deep yellow is quite impressive with its psychological description of a figure. I consider this painting an eloquent representation of melancholic, innermost, and complex emotions. Qwaya’s paintings are on the whole a manifestation of the emotional and psychological with audacious brushstrokes and psychologically indicative lines, while capturing the eyes gazing at something, pursed lips, and a depressed look.

 

Qwaya has worked on a wide array of pictures after studying fashion design. He has been involved in album covers, graphic work, webzines, and book illustrations. He is an artist-cum-visual image producer whose paintings were received by a multitude of fans when posted on social networking sites like Facebook. Art has changed in the advent of artists like Qwaya. There have been changes in the way an artwork communicates with viewers, the formation of the audience, the consumption aspects of artworks, and the territory of the art market. It is worth noting that both the producers and consumers of artworks have undergone some epoch-making changes, as the structure and boundary of the preexisting art scene has collapsed. Qwaya’s presence is closely associated with the aspects of such changes.

 

Qwaya has painted by making strokes with a brush or in oil pastels on unprimed canvas. He seems to lay stress on encapsulating his momentary sentiments in his paintings. He tends to paint spontaneously and intuitively on the canvas without modification so as to heap up his vivid emotions and to be honest with his sentiments. Oil pastels are adjusted somewhere between a flexible brush and his hand attached to his body. His work seems particularly marked and defined by instinctive painting, instrumentality that is convenient to describe a variety of images floating in his mind and spirit, and the coexistence of painting and writing in the same space. Oil pastels analogous to crayons we handled skillfully as a child is a medium very easy to apply and treat. Qwaya is also doing paper work since paper or panels can be more effective in using oil pastels than canvas.

 

A painting was initially either a story or a book. A painting is a visible condensed sentence or a determined image. In contemporary art, a painting subordinated to literature seeks its own self-sufficient world. This forecloses literary factors from art, erases narratives, and drives the content out of its domain. The history of contemporary art was to draw a distinction between art and literature and explore art’s own form and material elements. This was also to confirm the physical properties of a given canvas, paints, brushstrokes, and colors and seek their relations. With this, numerous narratives and individual feelings cannot help but float out of the scene. Viewers were also marginalized from the painting. Since modernism was in decline, narratives, emotions, and romanticism has consistently seeped into paintings in contemporary art. This is nothing new. Painting today plays the role of a mirror reflecting an individual’s diverse stories, his or her inner self, and their spirit couched in various forms and expressive idioms. The problem is how to embody painting’s taste, quality, and intrinsic content.

 

Qwaya extracts various content for his paintings from his everyday life. He touches on narratives that hark back to his childhood innocence and memories or a romantic feeling between a young man and woman. His paintings all have literary titles. The title itself is like a poetic line, entailing a brief sentence. These narrative paintings make it easy for viewers to appreciate and understand. These have us consider the problems of trying to stay in a familiar story and complying with conventional perceptions.

 

A child with a particularly large head, ears, and hands frequently appears in his paintings. The child has a book in his arms. Children look at a titled frame or look out at the moon and stars outside the window. A child is resting his chin on his hand, lost in a reverie. A big cat that is with him in his studio appears in his painting. A man and a woman have a date, drinking under lights while human face-sized flowers bloom in a little pot. All these works have common, quotidian subject matter as well as unconsciously emerging images. Qwaya improvises and interprets all of these in his paintings. His urgent brushwork brings about some momentary feelings while his colors evoke a hypnotic, emotional atmosphere. These paintings rendered in this way feel comfortable and smooth.

 

The artist expressed his intent to put more emphasis on factors he tries to convey when he talked about his work’s content and technical hallmarks. He seems to look upon communication as important. Qwaya seems capable of producing narrative paintings pertaining to considerably emotional, romantic stories. The problem is how such stories appear formatively solid and pictorially unique. In recent work Qwaya treats dense surface texture in partially mild pastel tones and diverse images in more matured iconographic pictures. An example is a little child holding a book whose attractive section is completed in a very high quality. The problem is how he will be able to deepen this taste.