Danae Pink – Art Poster (2026)

Danae is a series in which the mythical woman shut away in a tower is split into three characters with pink, blue, and yellow hair. Each painting is in turn divided into three canvases shaped like the panels of a comic book. Locked in a bronze tower by her father, Danae is visited by Zeus in the form of a shower of gold and bears him a son, Perseus. Western painting has long shown her in a single pose: reclining on a bed, receiving the golden rain. I once heard that human emotion, pared down to its basics, comes to six—anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise—and I wanted to try portraying Danae through those six emotions. Following the manga convention of telling characters apart by the color of their hair, I divided the figure into three colors, as if looking into a single self from several directions. For my second solo exhibition, NU-FRAME (DOOSAN Gallery Seoul, Seoul, 2015), I wanted to try rebuilding the very frame that holds a painting. Drawing on the diagonal and straight panels common in manga, I made the canvas stretchers themselves into comic panels. Translating these irregular flat shapes into wooden frames was harder than I had expected. Where the canvases meet, a shadow forms, and I hoped it would read as the line that divides one panel from the next. Danae Blue, Danae Pink, and Danae Yellow (2015, oil on canvas, 261 × 194 cm each) each join three shaped canvases into a single work, and within them the three Danaes reveal different emotions. A full-length figure and a close-up face share one picture, a device borrowed from manga, in which a large face is layered behind a character to show what they feel inside. The image runs on across some gaps and breaks off at others, as separate panels come together into a single picture. The golden rain does not fall like rain; it bursts out behind the figure like a manga effect. The white wings in the background stand for Zeus, and the small winged child to one side is Eros, who so often attends Danae in classical painting. The gallery, too, was arranged like Danae's chamber. The window gallery at the entrance held six color-field paintings matching Danae Cut-In in shape and size, and further in were the drawings and the paintings of the background effects alone. Beyond a large wall dividing the space, the six faces were half hidden from view, and only after rounding that wall, in the innermost room, could visitors meet the three Danaes. I wanted the route to feel like going in to see a figure kept shut away. It is hard to say whether the subject or the form came first. In part I chose this subject in order to build the frames; in part I sought out a form for Danae. The two arrive at the same time and become a single idea. The series took other forms as well: Danae Drawing (2015, pen on paper mounted on panel, 22 × 16 cm each), six poses and expressions; Danae Composition (2015, oil on canvas, 73 × 117 cm each), the background effects on their own; Danae Cut-In (2015, acrylic on canvas, six works, each 146 cm high), shaped canvases of close-up faces; and Danae Cut-In Color (2015), the same shapes reduced to fields of color. The following year, for NU (DOOSAN Gallery New York, 2016), I added six square works, each taking a detail of the large paintings, like fragments. All of them come close to a process of looking at one figure again and again, from different distances and in different forms.