Ju Tae-Seok 주태석

Ju Tae Seok (b. 1954, Daegu) is a Korean painter who has spent his career pursuing figurative, hyperrealist painting at a moment when the Korean art world was dominated by abstraction and monochrome painting (Dansaekhwa). He began with a meticulously observed "Railroad Tracks" series, and since the 1990s his work has been noted for a departure from pure hyperrealism through the use of color-field division and subjective color — emphasizing the shadows cast on floors and walls to heighten the image, omitting unnecessary description of ground or wall, and using color contrast to add tension, so that the flatness of modernist painting and the illusionism of realist representation coexist within a single picture.

He graduated from Hongik University's College of Fine Arts in 1978 and its Graduate School of Painting in 1980, and was a Visiting Researcher at Tokyo University of the Arts in 2009. He served as Professor in the Department of Painting at his alma mater from 1992 to 2019, later becoming President of the University Art Association (2011) and Director of the Hongik Museum of Contemporary Art (2017). Over his career he has held 54 solo exhibitions in Seoul, Busan, Daegu, Tokyo, Beijing, Shanghai, Nagoya, Kitakyushu, and Paris, and taken part in more than 800 group and international exhibitions. His work is held in the collections of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, the Seoul Museum of Art, and numerous other Korean institutions, as well as the Blue House and the National Assembly.