Torso – Art Poster (2026)

The digital works are large-format prints of digital drawings, made from the 2010 graduation piece At the Last Judgment through 2011. They were my first attempt to carry the subjects of classical painting and sculpture into the visual language of manga and anime. At the Last Judgment (2010, digital print, 380 × 290 cm) is the first work I drew in the style of manga. Until then I had made painterly figurative work and a range of studies, but when I actually set out to make a work from manga imagery, it was not easy. Learning the form well enough to bring it into my work looked as though it would take a long time, and while wondering what could serve as both a work and drawing practice, I decided to paint a crowd. Michelangelo's The Last Judgment (1536–1541, fresco, Sistine Chapel) was exactly the right subject. Redrawing it in an anime style would serve as drawing practice and, at the same time, make a strong enough impression for a first work. The longer I looked at the original, the more I could glimpse, beyond its solemn scene, the stance and will of the artist who painted it. The composition follows the original. Christ in judgment is at the center; the saved rise on the left and the damned fall on the right, and below is the boat bound for hell. The attributes of the saints were kept as they were. But instead of the Book of Life, the angels hold a laptop and a tablet, pink clouds rise above the fires of hell, and most of the figures are drawn as women. After Michelangelo's death, the nudes of The Last Judgment were painted over with drapery by decision of the Church. I took that drapery away again. The Christ of the original stands in a solemn pose that divides heaven from earth, but the protagonist of this picture, like a boy in a shōnen manga, is caught at the instant of missing a step, about to fall flat at any moment. Drawing it made me think about who judges what, and who is judged. A picture nearly four meters tall, it was drawn digitally and printed. I had always painted in oils at art school, but I felt that starting something new called for a change of medium to refresh my thinking. At the time, I was captivated by the lightness and boundless possibilities of digital painting. It was drawn in Photoshop, with most of it vectorized using the pen tool so that the lines would not break up when printed large. The work was first shown in my university graduation exhibition (Seoul Art Center Gongpyeong Gallery, Seoul, 2010). After the graduation exhibition I drew Laocoon (2010, digital print, 230 × 295 cm), Torso (2011, digital print, 116 × 92 cm) and Cronos (2011, digital print, 116 × 82 cm) in the same way. They were studies in carrying classical stories, one by one, into the style of anime. Torso became the first work of the Torso series. In Laocoon, the three figures were turned into women, and their bodies, entangled in the coils of brightly colored serpents, were drawn over a pattern of red and green. The black-and-white series of 2024 set out again from this picture. The surface once full of color and pattern became black and white, and the serpents, once plainly visible, were hidden in the black ground. Cronos depicts the Titan who swallowed his children one after another at birth because of a prophecy that he would be overthrown by his own child. Cronos was later conflated with Chronos, the personification of time, and came to be regarded as a god of time himself. The subject was taken from Goya's Saturn Devouring His Son (1820–1823), but the composition is different. Here Cronos is a winged woman who, as befits the god of time, holds in one hand a scythe fitted with clockwork and in the other the child she is about to swallow, as she soars up among stars and pink clouds. A cruel scene is drawn bright and cute. Working digitally gave me freedom, but the prints did not give me the colors and textures I wanted. Reproducing screen colors faithfully in print was a technical limitation at the time. A long-proven method was reliable, and it was also what I could do best, so when I decided to pursue the torso as a single subject, I shifted the center of my practice back to canvas. Since then, digital drawing has mostly served as the underdrawing for my paintings. My present method, in which an image that begins as a computer drawing is transferred to canvas and developed there, came out of this period.