Daejeon Arts Collective prepares for 2025 exhibition

A wooden chair by artist Hank Haddock / Courtesy of Hank Haddock

DAEJEON — “I failed art class in elementary school. At least twice,” artist Hank Haddock said in an interview with The Korea Times.

Haddock was busy preparing for the Daejeon Arts Collective’s (DJAC) twice-yearly group exhibition. In advance of the exhibition, he talked to The Korea Times about his artistic trajectory, particularly within the DJAC. The DJAC is an association of artists from around the world living in Daejeon, and Haddock has been a member for seven years.

After graduating from university, Haddock worked professionally as a carpenter and wrote fiction and poetry for years in the U.S. before moving to Korea. With the extra time and energy he found in Korea, he devoted himself to painting.

“I can't paint pictures of flowers and people because I don't have the patience, the skill or the desire — mostly the desire — to do that," he said. "It was just all abstract painting. I just did hundreds of paintings, actually, probably 200 or more.”

After joining the DJAC, Haddock found friends and future collaborators. His interest shifted to furniture carpentry. His work became not only accessible but functional as well. This allowed his work to live in people’s homes, including his own, which he shares with his wife, artist Haesook Kim.

“When we bought the house that we're in now, I started making furniture because all of the spaces in the house, all of the houses in Korea, the spaces are odd, right?" he said. "Our house has got small spaces. I started making tables and stuff to go places. The pieces I made were all connected to the wall at one point. Then eventually, they became free-standing.”

He made around 30 tables, largely from materials he found in the street for garbage pickup. Then, he began making abstract sculptural woodwork. Being a member of DJAC gave him a chance to exhibit his artwork and make connections with other artists.

His furniture and woodwork are inspired by Dutch designer Gerrit Rietveld and Italian designer Enzo Mari. He has built many Rietveld chairs, as Rietveld made his drafts of his simplistically playful furniture designs publicly available for aficionados to create their own chairs. Likewise, Mari’s book, "Autoprogettazione," details the DIY construction of how to create items of furniture from ubiquitous materials, including cuts of wood available at most lumber yards. Haddock has created several Rietveld chairs for himself and for friends.

Haddock’s artistic sensibility is not so much a rejection of the class pretensions so often associated with the art world as it is an embrace of working-class people and their aesthetics. Over the past five years, he has taken up street photography.

Describing photography as “a mild major obsession,” he said, “Photography has been the most all-encompassing thing in art I've ever done. It takes up almost all of my free time.”

Hank Haddock's photography / Courtesy of Hank Haddock

Influenced by master photographers Dianne Arbus, Garry Winogrand, Robert Frank, Vivian Maier and Youngsoo Han, Haddock uses vintage cameras to spontaneously capture the excitement and banality of everyday life, especially among blue-collar workers and the visual cacophony of Korean street markets, on black-and-white film.

He doesn’t reject technology but prefers the physicality of film as a medium. He custom-built his own darkroom largely out of found materials, including old wooden street signs and corrugated metal from his friends’ house. Most of the furniture is on casters, allowing him to wheel his tables and cabinets into formations like a giant game of Tetris to accommodate the various stages needed to develop film and photos.

His creative practice is alive to the opportunities of any given moment, whether that means taking photos from his van while waiting for the stoplight to change or discovering discarded materials on the sidewalk to collect and upcycle into artwork.

“I'm not a perfectionist at all," he said. "If I'm working on something and I like the way it looks, I just go with it. I'm almost never hung up on my idea of what I want something to be because most things in life don't work out the way you want them anyway, even non-art-related stuff.”

Hank Haddock's woodwork art / Courtesy of Hank Haddock

For the upcoming DJAC exhibition, he’s exhibiting a piece he previously exhibited with the DJAC and then destroyed. “It was a tabletop, but I realized it just wasn't going to work as a tabletop, so I put it on the wall. About three or four years ago, I just cut it up because I was just going to throw it away. So I cut it up, and it was on the ground, and I was looking at it, and I was like, 'This isn't that bad.' So then I took it out and I just turned everything over and I painted the edges green. And now it's up on my wall, all broken in the same orientation in terms of how it would have gone together.”

When asked why he makes art, he replied, “Life is pretty dull. It’s arduous. Even when it’s comfortable, it’s still difficult. But then you have these moments of clarity that things are exactly as they should be. Those moments come pretty often.”

The DJAC will have its next group exhibition at Yun Gallery in Daejeon's Seonwha-dong from Thursday to May 6. The art opening will be on Saturday from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. Visit fb.com/DaejeonArtsCollective or follow @daejeonartsco on Instagram for more information.

Monica Nickolai is a writer and artist. Her text-based artwork has appeared at exhibitions in the U.S., Europe and Korea. She currently lives in Daejeon and teaches at Hongik University's Sejong Campus. Visit monicanickolai.com for more information.