PAINTINGS THAT DISTORT OUR VIEW AND MAKE US QUESTION OUR REALITY, A LOOK AT KIM BYUNGKWAN Painter Kim Byungkwan distorts our view, turning popular icons and images into abstract figurative masterpieces. From viewing his works you learn to expect the unexpected. Nothing is as it seems inByungkwan’s paintings no matter how familiar they may feel, and this is exactly his goal. He wants to break up the mundane, break up the familiarity, and push the viewer to look deeper. Kim inspires you to not only look deeper within his works but in life itself and to seek adventure and wonder. Some of his most common subjects include cartoon characters like Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Pinocchio. He takes these happy children’s cartoons and presents them in an almost ominous setting with dark backgrounds and angry or sad expressions. In other paintings we see classical renaissance style portraits done in his signature scratched up abstract style. You also notice the lightly drawn sketches of these previously mentioned cartoons done over the portraits like masks. It’s exactly this style that allows Kim Byungkwan to disrupt your vision. At first, you see somethingfamiliar and comforting, then you see the dark colors and violent scratches and splatters of paint, you are then put on the edge. Your emotions are mixed up, you don’t know what you should be feeling from this work, should you be excited or should you be scared, either way, you can’t take your eyes off it.

What I would like to express through my work is very simple.
I am trying to bring out strangeness from familiarity (visual habit).
Everything there is out there in this world, more or less, provides familiar vision.
This familiar vision can be replaced as habit. This habitual vision which every object gives us and creates
comfort. However it shuts down all the other possibilities.
The habitual vision or visual habit makes us go by the routine ways. It stops us from having adventure and
checking out the wonders out there.
My work is trying to destroy, tear up, and reconstruct this habitual vision so that our vision can be expended
to other images.
I have strong faith in my work that my personal behaviour may lead us