Born in Seoul, Australian landscape painter Min-Woo attended the South Korean National Art School before immigrating to NSW, studying at Tafe and then the Sydney College of the Arts where he graduated with honours in 1999.

Reflecting finely tuned technical skills as well as an in-depth cerebral exploration, Min-Woo’s hauntingly beatific compositions are reminiscent of both Eastern and Western painterly aesthetics. Utilising a delicately balanced palette, the artist poetically renders the surface of his canvas to much critical acclaim.

Bang’s use of perspective, often setting his roiling clouds above mountains and forests, gently directs the viewer’s eye to the centre of the picture. The artist’s love of 16th and 17th century European landscape paintings can be found in these kinds of compositions, where the details of supporting scenery, say a suggestion of a tree or a branch, or even a range of mountains, act as a frame to the central subject – the sky itself. And by using the Australian landscape as his key subject, Bang also suggests in his work not so much a Romantic lineage, but perhaps a more Gothic imagination.

Bang’s paintings reinstate this idea of the majesty of nature into art, in what he calls ‘the inexhaustible immensity of the sky’. Working from hundreds of photographs taken on annual field trips to the mountains in January when the summer rains roll in, Bang creates sketches and preliminary small works in acrylics and oils in preparation for the move to a larger canvas. The paintings begin as abstract fields of colour as Bang works to find within them the form of the final picture, finalised under a silky glaze. He discovers within the paint the atmosphere of the picture, what the artist refers to as ‘another dimension for understanding the world.’