Hernan Bas invites you to 'Choose Your Own Adventure'
![Large-scale paintings by American artist Hernan Bas including “The Young Man and the Sea,” left, are hanging on a wall covered with wallpaper, which is the artist’s work “Monsters and Mariners.” They are part of a solo show of Bas, which started last month at Space K Seoul, a new museum that Kolon Group opened last autumn in Magok, a far western area of Seoul. [MOON SO-YOUNG]](https://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/data/photo/2021/03/08/921c9709-d057-4f9a-b68b-cebec453ea15.jpg)
Large-scale paintings by American artist Hernan Bas including “The Young Man and the Sea,” left, are hanging on a wall covered with wallpaper, which is the artist’s work “Monsters and Mariners.” They are part of a solo show of Bas, which started last month at Space K Seoul, a new museum that Kolon Group opened last autumn in Magok, a far western area of Seoul. [MOON SO-YOUNG]
Large-scale paintings by American artist Hernan Bas, including “The Young Man and the Sea,” are now hanging on a wall covered with wallpaper, which is also the artist’s work “Monsters and Mariners.”
They are part of a solo show of Bas, which started last month at Space K Seoul, a new museum that Kolon Group opened last autumn in Magok, a far western area of Seoul.
Bas is well known for colorful, dramatic paintings which often tell stories created by the artist inspired by literature and which almost always feature boys on the threshold of sexual self-discovery.
Many of the paintings in this show were inspired by the 1980s children’s book series “Choose Your Own Adventure,” which is also the title of the exhibition. Among them, “The Young Man and the Sea” was inspired by the American novelist Ernest Hemingway, who fell in love with and moved to Cuba, which is also where the artist’s parents emigrated from.
“In my version of The Old Man and the Sea, I turn it into The Young Man and The Sea,” Bas said in a video interview. “And it is sort of a revenge in a sense for the character in Hemingway’s novel where famously the fisherman catches this giant marlin and after fighting for days, he strapped it to his boat and attempts to drag it to the shore only to be eaten by the sharks all along the way home. So in my version, the young fisherman has drivingly caught a shark and is taking it home as a sort of trophy as a bit of a revenge for the old man and the sea.”
The exhibition runs through May 27. For details, visit www.spacek.co.kr
BY MOON SO-YOUNG [symoon@joongang.co.kr]
with the Korea JoongAng Daily
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