Edward Hopper’s solo exhibition in Korea creates frenzy

Second Story Sunlight by Edward Hopper

The solo exhibition of late American artist Edward Hopper in Seoul is drawing the attention of many art lovers and the art community in South Korea, with the accumulated number of visitors hitting 210,000 as of Wednesday.

The exhibition, “Edward Hopper: From City to Coast,” which opened at the Seoul Museum of Art in April, is the talk of the town, leading many related books to be sold and published.

Sales of Hopper-related books jumped 241.4 percent in April, immediately after the exhibition began, from a month earlier at Yes24 Co., Korea’s largest online bookstore operator.

Of the seven Hopper-related books published in Korea, the most sold book is “Edward Hopper: A-Z” by Ulf Küster, which was published in time for the exhibition. It organizes Hopper‘s life in alphabetical keywords and became a bestseller in the art category.

A new book authored by Korean art historian Lee Yeon-sik, “Edward Hopper’s Gaze,” was also published in June. It illuminates and analyzes the world of Hopper’s paintings, reflecting on Hopper‘s life using 15 keywords including theater, station, and eroticism.

The most complete book on Hopper’s life is Gail Levin’s “Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography,” published in 2012 by EULYOO PUBLISHING Co., but it is currently out of print.

Levin, who was Hopper’s first curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, describes Hopper as a “painter of light.”

He says that Hopper completes his paintings with light and shows how powerful sunlight can be in a painting.

Hopper is exceptionally popular among artists.

Mark Strand, named the U.S. poet laureate in 1990, wrote in his book “Hopper” that he wanted to correct the old misconceptions of critics.

He wrote that Hopper’s paintings are said to show the satisfaction and anxiety from the life changes that Americans experienced in the early 20th century but it doesn’t fully explain the strong response from audiences.

Strand shows how the formal elements of the paintings locate the viewer, as he says, “in a virtual space where the influence and availability of feeling predominate.”

There is also an unprecedented collection of short stories named “In Sunlight or In Shadow: Stories Inspired by the Paintings of Edward Hopper,” an anthology of seventeen stories crafted by Joyce Carol Oates, Stephen King, Michael Connelly, among many others, which are inspired by the paintings of Hopper.

Published in 2017, it features thrillers, dramas, and crime stories, including Stephen King’s “The Music Room,” a story inspired by Hopper’s 1932 painting Room in New York that depicts a couple living through the Great Depression.