Biography
Kwan Oh Jun was born in Seoul, South Korea .
He majored in medicine and obtained a medical doctor license.
However, the artist could not give up his desire for art, which he had since childhood.
So, Kwan Oh Jun entered GRADUATE SCHOOL OF FINE ART, HONGIK UNIVERSITY, majoring in painting.
Based on the fact that humans are existential beings, artist Kwan Oh Jun defines modern people as alienated beings, depressed (melancholy) beings, and anxious beings, and proceeds with the work of pictorial expression.
Existentialist philosophers saw human finitude as the fundamental cause of alienation and anxiety.
For Kwan Oh Jun, the corona pandemic provided an opportunity to confront existential solitude of human beings.
Roland Barthes coined ‘punctum’ as the concept of ‘things of chance that attack the viewer as if stabbing them’ when viewing photographic images.
This contrasts with the ‘studium’, which is the message of photography perceived by the subjective eye of the viewer regardless of cultural tradition. In contrast, the ‘studium’ is the totality of the message of photography understood under the cultural promise.
The artist selects photos that give him the experience of ‘punctum’ among the photos he took by himself and uses them in his work.
Kwan Oh Jun works in a way that reveals the alienation, depression, and anxiety of modern people by using pictorial composition and colors based on selected photographs.