the Self-Portraits of Ouchul Hwang: Painting, Drawing, and Process Becoming

The Self-Portraits of Ouchul Hwang is a contemporary art book that explores identity not as a fixed image, but as an ongoing process of transformation. Moving across painting and sculpture, Ouchul Hwang approaches the self-portrait as a field of inquiry where perception, memory, gesture, and material continuously reshape one another.Rather than presenting the face as a stable marker of identity, these works destabilize it. Faces fracture, dissolve, overlap, and re-emerge through expressive layers of color and form. Recognition is interrupted. The image resists completion. What appears is not likeness, but becoming.Throughout this body of work, painting functions not as representation, but as a method of thinking. Each surface records an encounter between intention and resistance, where the self is not depicted but formed through the act of making itself. The paintings remain open, unresolved, and in motion, allowing identity to appear as something fluid, unstable, and continually evolving.This investigation extends into sculptural works, where the self takes on material presence. Clay, glaze, texture, and form transform the image into object, shifting the self from representation toward embodiment. The result is a visual language that moves between abstraction and figuration, intimacy and fragmentation, silence and intensity.Positioned within a lineage that includes Francis Bacon, Georg Baselitz, and Jean Dubuffet, Hwang's work advances a distinct contemporary vision: the self is not an entity to be defined once and for all, but a process that unfolds through sensation, perception, and material transformation.The Self-Portraits of Ouchul Hwang does not attempt to answer the question of identity.It sustains it.

Pagina's: 148, Paperback, Independently published