Experiencing Min-Woo Bang’s landscapes is like being immersed in nature and feeling its different states of change. In the artist’s new series, Highland, the viewer is invited to contemplate each work intimately through subtle pictorial devises. Sometimes our eye is led through shadows of foliage into brightly lit sky-scapes from the outside in, with chiaroscuro effects creating a dramatic interplay between light and dark. At other times our point of view is led into the distance, our attention captured by the dramatic shifting of clouds in changing light and across a stretch of sky. Occasionally our gaze will gently rest on a solitary cloud, which may be a metaphor for a thought or idea, floating above the world below.In a recent essay, Dr. Andrew Frost (2018) explains how Min-Woo Bang’s paintings “reinstate this idea of the majesty of nature into art, in what (the artist) 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.’”Min-Woo Bang is a past finalist in the Wynne Prize at the Art Gallery of NSW, Muswellbrook Art Prize, King’s School Art Prize, NSW Parliament Plein Air Painting Prize, Tattersall’s Art Prize, Mosman Art Prize, Paddington Art Prize, KAAF Art Prize (2014 Winner) and the Gold Coast Art Prize. His work was most recently placed in the collection of the Penrith Regional Gallery & The Lewers Bequest.