Trivial Everyday

About the Artist

Shim Hyunhee is an artist who has maintained an independent path since the late 1980s through the 1990s, rejecting the dichotomous frameworks that dominated the Korean art scene. After studying traditional East Asian painting, focusing on ink wash and figurative work at Seoul National University's College of Fine Arts and its graduate school, she refused to settle into either the grand narratives of Minjung Art or the ink-centric orthodoxy of the established East Asian painting establishment. Instead, unbound by genre boundaries or rhetorical vocabulary, she focused on the 'compulsion to paint' and built her own artistic world. The most prominent subject in her oeuvre is the 'human figure.' She has painted the faces of elderly people—concentrating the trajectories of life and its joys and sorrows—as large-scale works of 200 to 300 ho (roughly 2 to 3 meters), maximizing the presence of her subjects. Her figurative depictions are notable for their layering of multiple lines and brushstrokes rather than smooth single-line finishes, capturing the flow of ever-changing impressions within a single canvas. By juxtaposing flowers, folk painting motifs, and everyday objects, she weaves sociocultural perspectives and personal sentiments toward her subjects in multiple layers. Shim was also remarkably bold in her formal and material experimentation. Starting with ink wash, she moved through thick coloring on traditional Korean paper (jangji), and overcame the limitations of paper repelling paint by expanding to canvas and acrylic. She viewed the term 'Korean painting' (Hanguk-hwa) as constraining artistic freedom when used to oppose certain concepts or to categorize art by materials. What mattered to her was not material classification but painting 'pictures of our time' in which Korean identity naturally permeates. This attitude is evident in her titles: she prefers intuitive, concise names like Girl with Tied Hair or Looking at Flowers over speculative, abstract titles, because the essence she wishes to convey lies in the subject itself. She stripped away authoritative and polished pretenses, focusing instead on the earnest, honest subjects encountered in daily life—like dishes to wash or a head of napa cabbage. Ultimately, Shim Hyunhee's work is the product of a persistent practice of breaking free from the narrow classification systems imposed by the mainstream art world. Rather than projecting the solemnity of an artist, she reflected on herself as an everyday person, translating sentiments arising from daily life onto her canvases in the most intuitive manner. Her work stands as the solid record of an artist who chose to protect her own truth over following trends, and is recognized as an important achievement that broadened the horizons of Korean contemporary art.