featured artists
the colors of home departed
Travel down a luminous memory lane with Kwanghee Ko.
Color settles in Kwanghee Ko’s mind as a refined sense, empowering him to express the natural scenes he has stumbled upon as well as the density and temperature of memories and emotions that refuse to fade.
While based in Korea, Kwanghee’s sense of light and color was intensified by the culture. In contrast, the stark honesty and restraint of Berlin’s landscapes reduced color to a languid state of low-saturation and reverberation. At the same time, the nostalgic greens and blues of childhood scenes continue to direct Kwanghee’s sentimentality in the present, appearing and repeating without warning like a memento of days gone by.
Recently, Kwanghee started a black-and-white piece designed to visualize the invisible essence of ‘soom’, a Korean term which symbolizes the soul. In the process, he employed mixed materials such as oil, acrylic, pigment, charcoal, and graphite, pouring water on paper using brushes and hands to experiment with residual stains and levels of concentration. This work profoundly altered his way of dealing with color, giving voice to the unknown while striking a new balance between the forces of expression, emotion, and sensation.
Kwanghee’s use of color lies at the intersection between intuition and process. His works often begin with fluid sketchbook reflections: collections of visual fragments through which the semblance of form and color gradually rise. At this early stage, shapes vibrate with the rhythm of “breath,” and color is selected instinctively to match emergent textures and tones. Upon expansion, Kwanghee reassembles the color combinations of intuition to reflect his lived experiences, often celebrating his hometown and the memories of the land he departed.
From household objects and spiritual rituals, color for Kwanghee embodies a sense of home. It remains experiential, arising not from planned structure or theoretical analysis, but from an accumulation of bodily impulses and time. During this accumulation, transient colors appear and disappear in the flow, touching the lives of others as they construct pathways to invisible realms, elicit reactions, and reveal memories unspoken.
