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Trained as a painter in both the US and Korea, Whang describes his art as “digital sansuhwa,” a reinvention of traditional Korean ink and brush landscape painting using new technologies. His artworks are “digitized landscapes that illustrate the models of assimilation and transformation of nature in the context of our modern materialist and technology-driven civilization.”
Most recently, the artist glues materials like Lego blocks or man-made crystals to sheets of colored wood to approximate pixilated re-renderings of traditional Korean paintings. His After Mount Diamond, for example, shows only the extreme tonalities—all gray scale is eliminated during computer rendering—in yellow and black Lego.
This large work is derived from the Korean National Treasure, Mt. Diamond by the Joseon Dynasty painter, Jeong Seon (1676-1759). After Mount Diamond exemplifies Whang's role as a contemporary vanguard, a mixer of cultural input.
Whang was selected as the Korean National Museum of Contemporary Art's “Artist of the Year” in 1997, and was one of three artists representing Korea at the 2003 Venice Biennial.