On Kour Pour

The Spring Festival is a celebration marking the end of winter and New Year in the Lunar Calendar. Usually falling in January or February, the festival represents the desire for new life and is marked with a number of stories and celebrations. A central myth of the New Year’s celebrations is the celestial race between each of the animals of the zodiac, determining the order of the years. The tiger represented 2022, presenting us with a year marked by bravery, strength and exorcizing evil and malice from the environment.

Pour explores the Tiger throughout this practice, an auspicious and protective symbol that appears in the foundational mythologies of Chinese, Korean, and Japanese cultures. Pour’s tiger paintings take on personally as well as universally redolent themes of finding peace and power in the perceived ambiguity of expressing identity in an increasingly multicultural world. Reflecting on a 13th century Chinese tiger painting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art collection that was eventually reattributed as a 16th/17th century Korean or Japanese copy, Pour shares:

​​Tiger paintings have often been difficult to place cleanly within art history. The famous Korean Minhwa tigers are more graphic and exaggerated than Chinese paintings that are more naturalistic in style, yet they borrow compositions and poses from the older Chinese scrolls. The artists who made many of the early Japanese works that include tigers clearly looked towards Korean and Chinese paintings as tigers did not inhabit the island. In one painting, there can be several historical and cultural layers that trace the movement of the tiger image throughout Asia.

Pour’s tigers prioritize global histories over purely western perspectives and blend together different time periods and styles in fresh, new ways. Looking to the histories of reproduction, from early East Asian prints and paintings through to Pop Art, the artist builds his practice around intersections—of life, love, culture, and more—into an active and present body of work that connects historical conversations with the contemporary world.