Title of art	기찻길/Railroad			Sector	Painting (회화)
Art specifications	145?112cm			Material technique	Oil on canvas
Collection year	2006			Production year	1978
Gallery	Seoul Museum of Art			Artist	Ju, tae Seok
Description of art	“Railroad” (1978) magnifies one section of a railroad on the entire canvas and depicts pebbles, twigs, and scraps of magazines or newspapers floating around in the wind in a highly photorealistic manner. As the work expresses ordinary subject matter realistically, elements of his emotional sensibility are hard to find, yet the unique vertical perspective from top to bottom reveals his intention to focus the main agent’s gaze looking down at the subject matter. This implies that representational painting essentially reveals the intervention of the main agent’s body, or its view and temporality; therefore, when something is represented in the domain of painting, that painting can never be objective or fixed. He said: “(It is) ironic that the more I depict, the more unnatural the object becomes,” which is paradoxically irrefutable, and this is why ideological images might seem even more natural to our eyes. The issue of actuality in representation and ideological imagery has been explored by means of new forms in the series “Nature-Image,” that Ju started producing in the late 1980s. In this series, Ju overlapped images of trees realistically depicted in the foreground with their silhouettes presented as shadows in the background, thereby expressing the fact that pictorial representation itself is, as the title implies, a superposition of divided relationships between reality and image. In the end, Ju Tae Seok’s hyperrealistic paintings reveal that the represented form is created by corresponding with the main agent’s experience and viewpoint, thus inducing contemplation on representation, the essence of painting.
Address	61, Deoksugung-gil, Jung-gu, Seoul			Source	Seoul Metropolitan Government