Kwang-bum Jang came across a cross-section of worn traces of layers of paint that had built up over a long period of time on the inner wall of an old atelier in the Paris Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Kwang-Bum JANG became obsessed with Time. He passes most of his time on a work applying, and drying, dozens of layers upon thin multi coloured layers of acrylic paint on canvas, up to a hundred layers.
Following this painstaking process, Jang proceeds with shaving it off in circles, interlacing craters, revealing those multiple layers like erosion on a accumulated sediments, or like refracted light on water surface, a rainbow, or evoking the annual growth rings of a tree stump, or on a shell’s mother of pearl.
Thus Jang signs the passing of time, his time, life’s time, or geological times, when the abstract motive becomes figurative of his native Korea granite mountains, reminiscing of Jeong Seon’s 18th century mountain paintings.
Kwang-Bum Jang was born in 1972 in Seoul, he works in Paris, France, he exhibits at Artskoco gallery in Luxembourg, Galerie Woong in Seoul, and Galerie Françoise Livinec, Paris. His works part of the public collection of the Seoul National Museum of Modern & Contemporary Art since 2019.
Christophe Duplay- Artskoco gallery