Kwon Kyung Yup's paintings of bandaged girls might seem a little distressing to some, but the thought process behind the series of artworks is much more than some kind of fetishisation of 'damaged goods', or damsels in distress.
Says art critic Kho Chung-Hwan, who compares Yup's subjects with Lolita – a kind of innocent, but full of complexities and contradictions: "Girls like this [Lolita] appear in Kwon Kyung Yup's paintings. The asexual and immature sexual identity, the images of sickly and weak spirited girls invoke the Lolita syndrome. While being depicted realistically, they are felt as unreal beings, looking artificial like animation characters or mannequins. The overlapping of tantalizingly realistic depiction and the image of purity suggested by the aseptic, unnatural condition as if being cleared of worldly pollution increases
a strange tension.
The peculiar emotion you feel in response to Kwon's paintings, so to speak, is the compassion caused by what you think you read in the girls' expressions: the image of infirmity and weakness, asexual or immature sexual identity, and the compound of a sense of artificiality and the image of purity."
See more of Kwon Kyung Yup's work here
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