Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Han Young Wook
Korean; 21st-century
Chicago, IL: EXPO Chicago (Galerie Bhak’s Booth)
24%
Face. 2024. Oil on aluminum
It's not even really worth writing about something like this, but when I was strolling through EXPO I felt like it would be a dereliction of critical-archival duties not to pick out at least one thing that typified the fair's prevailing Yuppie Design Showroom Aesthetic. Problem is, criticizing most of that stuff would have been punching down, or like, hitting someone who's wearing boxing gloves as a fashion statement but isn't actually in the ring. For some reason — maybe because it's so technically proficient — it feels not all that bad to take this painting seriously, but still it feels weird. Anyway, there's not much to say about it as a painting. It's on aluminum, so it has a surfacey quality; the subject's pose has a little bit of twisty oomph but not that much and the gaze is direct but noncommittal w/r/t meaning, so it's in a sort of Goldilocks Zone of likability and interpretability; it's photorealism but it has nothing to do with photorealism's old Pictures-era conceptual-processual hangups — it's just a really impressive likeness, nothing more — so it gets to sort of wear a Real Art mask without having taken any of the steps real art has to take to justify its methods or its appearance. So: a thing that's primarily a picture but that glances at objecthood to add a little bit of superficial intrigue; an instance of expert craftsmanship, ersatz significance, and vague stylistic provenance that embeds a toughness-to-pin-down-what-it's-doing into its actual form; and an atavism of some erstwhile cool or advanced style that has long since been unmoored from the techniques and contexts that had given that style significance. This describes the type of kitsch that suffuses art fairs in 2025, if not kitsch as such. (2025)