About the artist: Kang Hyung Koo
Korean contemporary hyper-realistic portrait painter
Building on the first collection of 15,000 Soul Link NFTs, the second piece to the Soul Fiction project consists of a painted artwork of a hyper-realistic figure of the Imperator of Mars, the billionaire chief executive of Tesla and founder of SpaceX.
The figure on canvas will be the figure of Imperator of Mars(“The Body”) concocted by Korean contemporary artist Kang Hyung Koo. The image will center around a futuristic possible figure of the notable entrepreneur when he has conquered interstellar travel and reached Mars.
The clash of these two titans will open up another layer for community reflection and discussion on the spirit of adventurism and imagination.
Hyper-realistic Portraiture
Kang Hyung Koo is a Korean contemporary painter best known for his intense, larger-than-life oeuvres of historical icons, including Audrey Hepburn, Marilyn Monroe, Princess Diana, Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Albert Einstein, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and Andy Warhol.
Kang’s mesmerizing hyper-realistic technique allows for delicate wrinkles and expressions that cannot be captured in a photograph. His dramatic images psychologically overwhelm and stimulate the viewer through powerful colors and recurring visual distortions.
Drenched with compassion for strong-willed figures who have fought through the hardships of life and of history, the deep eyes of his subjects in portraits reveal their inner worlds and the traces of time they have lived through. In his works, Kang often tugs at the nostalgia of the past, allowing viewers to look into the souls of ancient figures, all the while, instilling the illusion that these figures are likewise looking into the souls of the viewers.
Although Kang’s artworks appear too realistic for them to be fictional, none of the actual images he paints actually exists in real life. His artwork is not merely a caricature of existing photographs but rather his fictional reimagination of the central figure in painting — he draws faces of iconic figures in history as they might have or would have become in the future.
Possible Impossibilities
The Korean word ‘광기’ (狂氣), mostly aptly translated as “madness” is central to Kang’s works of art. The craze and madness in his subject’s focused eyes reminds viewers that visionaries and human accomplishments are often borne out of the insanity of overcoming impossibilities.
“The Body” is an enigmatic study of possible impossibilities; it shows the clashing mismatch between an entrepreneur who envisions the impossible and an artist who paints the impossible.
In the forthcoming artwork which will be featured as part of Soul Fiction, artist Kang Hyung Koo will lay out a hyper-realistic portrait of Elon Musk, once again inverting one fictional reality at the end of possibly impossible reach of Imperator of Mars. Fact and fiction intertwined in a messy knot, an image of the future created ex nihilo, Kang’s paintings will once again shine in the Soul Fiction project, herein painting out the physical embodiment of Imperator of Mars(“The Body”).
Drawing out a subject who is alive and well, Kang Hyung Koo poses the question whether this is a future that can possibly exist. After all, the route to Mars remains open.
“Will he ever reach Mars in his lifetime?”
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