Fantasy Creatures of Ji Jong Ho

There is an amazing Korean artist who is big on recycling old tires and other rubber scraps for his startling sculptures. Ji Yong Ho, sees the rubber itself as a mutation of sorts, coming from nature but being transformed from the original forms into things entirely alien. It is also the malleability of rubber, and an artistically seen close approximation to both skin and muscles which help to make this medium even more artistically desirable.
This 29 year old is a very inventive artist, 29-year-old Ji renowned for creating and sculpting larger-than-life animals, such as the cats, hyenas, horses, , and menacing ram's heads which fill his studio in New York's Chelsea district, making it a fascinating place to visit. All his works are constructed from black tires, which as he says starts off as white sap latex, now changed utterly to a scary and menacing black colour, which creates startling imagery.

As an artist, ji started out experimenting in clay and bronze, soon feeling, however, that sculptures made from these looked too robotic, where a high degree of flexibility in rubber, much more in keeping with skin and muscle texture, gave him more freedom. He trys, in his art works, to capture what he sees asthe unspoken rawness of animal expression, citing, for instance, the wistful glance of a horse, or the Hyena hind leg cocking, as it prepares to attack prey.
Mutant figures so imaginatively created by this artistic innovator are really products of his Seoul lifeand fierce political debate about genetic engineering, which interested him a great deal. Darwin and the theory of evolution enthralled him, setting him to speculate how these writings and ideas might be applied to man's own attempts at tampering with nature through gene manipulation.

Domestic pets, such as cats and dogs are already bred to downplay their wild sides, so Ji believes, and he further maintains that his sculptures should be seen as warnings, in spite of their artistic merit. This visionary artist sees the human failure to exercise enough caution when tinkering with natural selection as quite possibly depriving us, in due course, of being able to see animals in their natural state at all, and having grown up by a school for children with Down's Syndrome, the impression they made upon him was profound.

He says that believes the smiles of such kids to be very pure, and through his art attempts to reproduce what he saw in their eyes, that same sadness and vulnerability, in the imaginary animal faces that he dreams up. Choosing to portray what could be interpreted seen as monsters, Ji obsesses over muscle, sinew and eye detail, to bring out the natural beauty of each beast he conjures up.

To gauge his success, you need only know that a shark he sculpted in 2008 went for $145,000 at auction, his fabulous works internationally recognized as they deserve to be. the Gana Art Gallery December 2009 show was a runaway success, each individual sculpture containing the most intricate detail and layering, making it certain that we will be seeing a lot more from this creative talent as time goes by.