Jo Gyuhun
South Korean Artist Jo Gyuhun, nicknamed Pipipopo, started his career as an animator after graduating with a major in animation from Hanseo University.
In 2019, Jo started to paint in his current style of cartoonish paintings. This allowed him to be confident in the subjects and styles of his first artistic practice. Jo began to paint these works “Children Hiding Their Faces In Their Hands” after being inspired by a scene from a music video that he came across. In the scene, a young girl in a white shirt was crying with her hands covering her face. The spectacular scene at that moment left a strong and vivid impression in his memory and later encouraged him to paint, using children hiding their faces with their small hands as the main subject for his paintings.
As he already explained his main art concept, the fairy-tale-like paintings of children with small hands evoke the audience’s curiosity and helps the audience to imagine various facial expressions behind the children's hands in his paintings. Audiences naturally imagine and can guess many different expressions such as shyness, happiness, or maybe cynicism, embarrassment and shame or frustration and so on. Jo sees pure beauty in the innocent gestures of children and invites the audience to enjoy the moment of curiosity while imagining another layer of conflicting and complicating emotions behind the small hands covering their faces. This artistic approach is the main theme and concept of his art practice.
Jo said “ Behind their hidden faces, what do they really see? What do they really think? Or what might be their true mind or expressions? I truly hope the viewer can enjoy imagination through the hand gestures of children in my work."
He has participated in various solo and group shows not only in Seoul, Busan and Gyeonggi-do in South Korea but also in Taipei(2022), Paris(2022) and Shanghai (2021). He is planning to participate in the START art fair London (2022).
Artist Jo Gyuhun currently works and lives in Incheon, South Korea.
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