Lot 1322: WHANG INKIE

WHANG INKIE
(B. 1951)
Pla Cézanne 002 (Relief)
titled, inscribed and signed '"Pla Cezanne MST002 288F-1" (Relief) Plastic lego Blocks on board Inkie Whang' in English; dated '2010' (on the reverse)
plastic blocks on wood panel
134.4 x 230.6 cm. (52 7/8 x 90 3/4 in.)
Executed in 2010

Whang Inkie's work aspires from a sense of universalism by the resuscitative compromise of two different cultures of East and West; old and new; a personal and societal history with his grandiose mixed media puzzles in his desire to create a new order and yet stays faithful to the conventional academic rules. He digitalizes still life and typical landscapes into small pixels made of plastic blocks, silicones or Swarovski crystals, drafting reproductions of traditional oriental painting or historical art masterpieces.

Whang's signature medium, plastic blocks, are meticulously layered in resemblance of a computer-aided exploitation of an image, exaggerated in extreme magnification that decodes the overall image into grids of colourful units; easily swaying between the original, identifiable image and the overblown abstract version of it. Misleading the eye to fuse synthetic colours and the rigid shape of Lego blocks into one complementary pool of colour, the vivid colours of meticulously assembled blocks thus delude a textural depth, diffusing outlines by forming them where needed; ultimately impressing a three-dimensional form and a convex volume akin to a relief in his tribute to Cezanne by characterizing the fundamentals that he held essential "the beauty in art is created not only by the objects of representation, but by the relationship of line and colour." Pla Cezanne 002 (Relief) (Lot 1322) is directly amplified onto the still life arrangement more so than the original painting of Still life with Commode. The surface varies in waves of depth, creating a visual tension yet playfully toying with light and constantly stimulating our eye with shifting illusion. As Cezanne united Cubism and Impressionism, Whang interpreted Cezanne's persona in his own stylistic adaptation by breaking and re-assembling the initial image in Cubist approach and by utilizing impressionistic pixels as his brushstroke; and at the same time, his technique and materials cleverly challenges our taken-for-granted notions of image-making, suggesting that the new media and materials of our contemporary era offer new ways of seeing that have only begun to be explored.