Page 8 - 장범순 개인전 2023. 10. 11 - 10. 16 인사아트프라자갤러리

show respect to an opponent. By deliberately including ‘respect’ in the title of the exhibition, Jang
pays his respects to the original “Squid Game”, while also seeking to differentiate his own work
from the original.

"Squid Game” is a black comedy that satirises the social backwardness and contradictory reality of
Korea in the 21st century. By twisting real-life events and phenomena, it critiques the unfairness
and absurdity of its uneven playing field. "Squid Game" is already a parody of various contemporary
social phenomena, but Jang is able to put across his own view of the contemporary world through

a meta-parody that reappropriates "Squid Game" as a series of paintings. Using his unique visual
methods, he brings each individual work together into a meaningful whole that borrows from the
original drama series but sets it in a different context.

Parodying a source or text is a common theme in literature and art. However, it is rare to use
a meta-parody to reflect on and criticise the reality of the time. This is because artists have so
many vivid experiences that they can draw on from their own life that they do not feel the need to
borrow from other works. Nevertheless, Jang seeks to borrow from a work in the genre of the

moving picture to create his paintings in this series. As mentioned previously, there is a sense of
homage to "Squid Game," but he also translates the powerful implications of the original film into
his own flat language and resets and reconstructs the narrative of the drama into a fixed shape
on the canvas. Unlike the drama, he attempts to amplify the content graphically and convey it

to the audience through a pictorial communicative structure. As a result, the scenes depicting
the episodes, each reduced to an individual unit, are distinct from the original, but together they
remain true to the overall flow and nuance of "Squid Game".

"Cosplay of a Righteous Person" and "Towards the Heights" successfully demonstrate the
essence of the whole, while "The Winner Takes It All" symbolically deals with a situation in which
wealth and power are monopolised by a god-like villain in human form wearing a beast mask in
something akin to a parable of neoliberalism. It is a compressed mise-en-scene construction both

interpreting and responding to the film.

Here, rather than following the traditional painting methods of 'reproduction' or 'representation',
the artist deprives the characters of personality, instead employing symbolic figures only

differentiated by gesture and colour. 'Faktura' is eschewed as a means of communication,
replaced by simple symbolic materials that act as information units to reveal the artist’s intent.