김산 김산

Kim San (b. 1989) is a young Korean painter from Jeju whose work paints nature as a topos — a refuge that nature offers to human beings. For the artist, nature is "a place that always waits, and that one can always return to when exhausted"; the recurring theme of his work, bonhyang (本鄕, literally "origin home"), is not simply a hometown but a place that gives an emotional answer to the fundamental question of human existence. Bonhyang is both the process of communing with nature that runs through Kim San's practice, and the space within which he listens to and dwells in nature's voice.

Kim San defines the landscapes marked by human traces as "social landscape," folding into them the memory of human affairs and the experience of individual lives. The white deer that recurs in his work is a symbol of longevity and pure spirituality, while the forest — rendered as *gotjawal*, Jeju's distinctive volcanic woodland — represents a refuge deep within the self. As the artist puts it: "Nature has no words, but its sound is understood by our inner selves. We are always held in nature's embrace, yet we live forgetting its fragrance."