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Northwest Figurative Artists' Alliance
an organization of realist and figurative artists from the pacific northwest
Mark Kang-O’Higgins
My work is firmly rooted in the figurative tradition. This has brought me work as a fine art instructor and as a commission portrait artist. I am interested in the human condition in both the physical and emotional sense.
Much of my work is formally concerned with solid objects/masses in space. I am interested in how objects/beings unfold themselves in space, manifest themselves, and realize themselves as objects and beings, spatially and mentally. In short how objects and beings emanate as physical and mental energy. In my work I want to describe their presence, in every sense of the word: both presence as individuals or events and presence in relation to (or in juxtaposition with) other events and environments.
The synthesis of an individual consciousness with its surroundings and the interaction of different consciousnesses are of particular interest to me from a phenomenological and existential point of view. Recently my work was also concerned with masked or depersonalized intelligences – how individuals can, at times, find each other unfathomable in the Wittgensteinian sense. Specifically, that of one individual never truly being able to know the mind of another and therefore being forced into speculation. Most recently, however, the philosophical questions and issues that my work springs from and attempt to address have been tempered by my desire to additionally represent the simple beauty and mystery of creation.