Min-Woo Bang

Min-Woo Bang’s surfaces, lustrously built up in oil and acrylic, are both dramatic and subtle in their effect. Sometimes an under-structure reveals itself behind a small crack or drip of paint; these deliberate flaws and uneven textures are reminders of the artist’s ongoing interests in the process of time, the fragility of memory and nature’s disintegration.

The physical elements and forces of nature are interdependent in Bang’s atmospheric landscapes, and the experience of nature’s decay and transformation is counter-balanced by a deep, physical and emotional connection to place.

The artist’s recent work focus on majestic skyscapes, as writer and academic Dr Andrew Frost explains, “Min-Woo Bang’s use of perspective, often setting his roiling clouds above mountains and forests, gently directs the viewer’s eye to the centre of the picture. The artist’s love of 16th and 17th century European landscape paintings can be found in these compositions, where the details of supporting scenery, say a suggestion of a tree or a branch, or even a range of mountains act as a frame to the central subject – the sky itself. And by using the Australian landscape as his key subject, Bang also suggests in his work not so much a romantic lineage, but perhaps a more gothic imagination’. (Dr Andrew Frost, The Inexhaustible Immensity of the Sky, 2018)

Min-Woo Bang has been a finalist in numerous national art awards and prizes, including the Wynne Prize for Landscape painting (2011), the NSW Parliament Plein Air Painting Prize (2012) and the King’s School Art Prize (2013). He is one of Sydney’s emerging new talents.

Min-Woo Bang interview with Richard Morecroft