Email: hagloria.eg@gmail.com
Website: www.hagloria.com/
Instagram: @glo_dwgw (Art account) @glo_ha_3 (Personal account)
Discord: GLO#0131
Gloria Eungyeol Ha is a Korean-Canadian contemporary painter and photographer based in Toronto. As an immigrant born in Korea and raised in New Brunswick significantly influenced her to study the personal identity, and interaction of human and outer world based on her own ideology. Ha's current art practice investigates confliction and interaction of contradictory concepts, that she had faced, for coexistences such as ideality and reality, dream and duty, and legal and illegal. she presents her serious investigation in satire and humorous format and attempts to communicate with viewers by adopting mass cultural components to show her unique way to deal with. She mostly works with mixed media focused on acrylic, oil, digital, pen, carve, and collage in diverse styles; characteristics of emphasizing the texture and colors.
Artist Statement
Living life involves making numerous choices, without knowing the answer, in the middle of confusion, complication, and ambiguity. Throughout our whole life of facing choices, we all experience ambivalence as being self-subjective.
The Ambivalence Series represents the exploration of ambivalent conflict through personal and social perspectives, which started at the personal time point to making choices. Incompatibility conflicts between ideality and reality and immaturity and maturity inside of me are the inevitable essence of life struggle which generates emotional complexity. The process of making the Ambivalence Series involved accepting the existence of ambivalent conflict itself inside of me, or society, rather than solve or fight it and dealing with my emotions with a cynical and critical perspective. The life struggle of ambivalence is represented by unrealistic scenery, which is composed of the incompatible and unrelated combination of elements from the real-world elements in the form of satire and symbolism. The adoption of real-world components is the interaction between the private ambivalent experience — which only exists in memory — and the real world.
Moon the Yellow Circle, and Coin the Yellow Circle
These two continuous works demonstrate the personal ambivalence between ideality and reality. Generated emotional complexity such as anxiety, frustration, anger, and sorrow, are narrated through the situating composition based on universal events. The Coin and Moon were created by capturing features of ambivalence such as contrast and difference. This inspired me to create contrasting textural effects, such as dented and protruded surfaces, by carving and squeezing paint. The diversity of painting styles, such as figurative painting and pop art with a doodle effect, add one spoon of humor or self-satire into the serious subject matter.
Never Grow Up
The character pop artwork demonstrates the personal ambivalence by an internal struggle between child-self and adult-self or immature-self and demands of maturity. Discomfort and the unharmonious mood are generated by mixing child-content, such as Peter Pan, which symbolizes innocent childhood, with the adult permitted content, purity and horror. The degenerated Peter Pan satirizes us losing the child part of our mind.
The Gap
The Gap reflects social ambivalence within a subjective perspective. This is the extension of personal ambivalence to satirize social or legal standards for food that are barely within legal parameters. The familiar logos on the metaphorical object match properties which demonstrate ambivalence about the legal standard and social perception.
"Ambivalence series: Moon the Yellow Circle". 2021, acrylic and mixed media on canvas, 30” x 24”
"Ambivalence series: Coin the Yellow Circle". 2021, acrylic and mixed media on canvas, 30” x 24”
"Ambivalence series: Never Grow-up, 2021, acrylic and mixed media on canvas, 24” x 36”
"Ambivalence series: The Gap". 2021, acrylic on four canvases, 8” x 8” each
Interview
What is your background?
I am a 1.5 generation Korean immigrant in Canada. I spent all of my teenage years in New Brunswick surrounded by different races after elementary school in Korea. I personally think that I wasn’t the successful case of an international student like others who have a lot of friends, fluent language kind of insider. When I think of my teenage life, it flew by so quickly and almost felt like one day. My past self was tormented by cultural differences, identity confusion, psychological management, and regret about past times.
How have your lived experiences informed your artistic practice?
Definitely my past life significantly informs my work. I am a person who receives external information through feeling instead of analyzing in my head. Most of the problems that impacted my life were invisible matters. My psychological matters such as self-embarrassment as a stranger, cultural confusion, and desire to be a different person have composed me, and this characteristic naturally made me obsessed with stories and daydream. The feeling that I receive from that unrealistic intangible art became a great source of inspiration and it actually widened my perspective. My current work also corresponds to my lived experience as keywords 'Confusion', 'Wander', and 'Lost'.
What does your work aim to say?
I believe one of the significant essentials for artwork is the emotional record at a certain moment, whether it is historical or personal. On the path of life, we experience many emotions from definite to vague, however there are very few extreme emotions at a certain age. As a student who is just about to be a member of society, these complicated emotions are very valuable to record because it is very personal and universal at the same time. Even though we all have different backgrounds in various situations, the emotion that can be experienced between ideal and reality, and child and adult keep confusing us with no exception. I do not want to miss this period of what I consider as one of the biggest chapters of my book of life. I just want the emotional interaction as standing in the middle of the intersection of life.
What is your usual artmaking process like? What are your preferred mediums?
Actually, I am comfortable bringing an idea from my head in words, so I write first about the concept and philosophical thoughts often with questioning. The metaphors and similes that I wrote inspired me to visualize writings. I love to use paint as my primary material, and I love textural work. The colours and textures are things that I mostly consider.
What are your plans for the future? How do you see your work evolving?
The person who has been saved by art is inevitably involved in the art. The meaning of art is more than what I can easily think of. I will definitely continue my art career over my life and for now, my goal is to get involved in the art community and expand my influence over society with my art. I want to explore the meaning of living in a deeper way and use the shape of life as my major concept. My goal for an art career is always to inspire, motivate, and entertain people inside of my universe.