Artist Yoo Geun-taek interprets the tradition of oriental painting with ink-and-wash colors on Korean paper from a modern perspective to provide a new perspective on everyday landscapes under the themes of nature and humans, everyday life, environment, and society.

After stacking several layers of Korean paper, the artist mixes the screen and the material by drawing a picture with physical force while the paper is wet. In the screen, paper, ink, and pigment are mixed together, changing the physical properties of the paper, and it is reborn as a new space-time rather than an ideal space for Korean painting.

In October 2021, artist Yoo Geun-taek won the Lee In-seong Art Award (the 22nd), which can be the biggest prize in our flower bed. Based on themes derived from nature and humans, environment and social problems, it was highly appreciated that it reproduced Korean painting from a modern perspective by practicing experimental materials and screens.

Using oriental painting materials, the artist transforms boring daily life into unfamiliar scenes. It captures momentary and fleeting phenomena occurring in small daily life and presents them in the form of a compressed space-time, not a momentary moment, but a mediating and compressed accumulated events, time, and history that form the moment.

In his work, he opens the possibility of creating a new narrative by mixing all forms of hints such as moment, impermanence, and fluidity that nature, humans, the environment, and society are triggered by inevitable changes through the process of bumping, seeing, and breathing in everyday life. This creates a complex and multi-layered painting structure with the Mimesis-like
spirit of the artist moving toward the fundamental essence of nature.

In this way, Yoo Geun-taek's paintings seem to be talking about individual narratives in everyday life, but in fact, social and psychological layers are found behind them. Daily life is not just a repetitive structure, but a world with the potential to change infinitely. This is where writer Yoo Geun-taek's new narrative and poetic imagination is located, and it is also a part that has been continuously emphasized through his pictorial world. Although everyday materials such as people, villages, landscapes, gardens, and fountains are used, the narratives pressed inside the stacked lights are infinite beyond time and space.