Startdrawing.org: the Asia Drawing Portal

And here is the first of many posts where I point out “the interesting, inspirational, original, creative and wonderful in Korea,” or at least try “to look at what was previously ordinary and mundane in a new light.” By no means am I going to confine myself to art in the traditional sense of the word, but it’s a good place to start.

(Drawings by Jun Seo Hahm)

The art in this post comes from Startdrawing.org, in it’s own words “a web resource portal for Asia’s artists and drawings,” which started “with the aim of showcasing and sharing drawings from talented artists in Asia, and in the process, promote the joys of drawing.” It features all kinds of drawings, from architecture to comics, and the artists whose works featured hail from 13 Asia countries; I found these works by Jun Seo Hahm and So-yuen Lee on the first page of the “Korea” category.

(Drawings by So-Yuen Lee)

True, both of those artists were born in Korea but moved overseas to pursue their work, and so rather than countering the cynical charge that few Koreans are creative, the fact that so few artists featured on that website are actually still in Korea arguably merely strengthens it. But there are some Korea-based artists featured, and I’m not denying that Korea would be a difficult place for artists with original ideas. Probably for artists in general too. For now though, I’m putting that aside and merely enjoying browsing through the pictures.

Update: As I was typing that, the pages were taking a long time to load, so I gave up looking further. But they’re working now, and actually there’s more works by Korea-based artists there than I first thought. For example, here is some definitely original – and slightly indecent – work by Yuji Yun:

(Drawings by Yeji Yun)

There’s grittier and/or more erotic ones on the website, but which are a little NSFW. Make sure to show them to the next person that claims Korea is a conservative country!

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