Park Kyung Ryul @ DOOSAN Gallery Seoul - To Counterclockwise

Park Kyung Ryul: To Counterclockwise
DOOSAN Gallery Seoul
Through July 11, 2020

DOOSAN Gallery Seoul presents To Counterclockwise, a solo exhibition by PARK KYUNG RYUL. Park was selected to participate in the DOOSAN Residency New York through an open call in 2019. After her solo exhibition in Korea, Park will commence her residency in New York, followed by her solo exhibition at DOOSAN Gallery New York. 

Park doesn’t see her works as typical paintings that convey or capture a certain story and illusion. Her works, which she calls ‘sculptural paintings’ herself, focus on the gesture of ‘drawing’, and involve spreading outside of her images the various elements that lie within them. She then experiments with the different spatial elements like the exhibition floor, stairs, walls and ceilings, as well as immaterial aspects including light and time, as the conditions for her paintings.

While the physical gesture of “painting” lies on the premise of a certain intention, the artist’s physical actions of applying brush strokes on an empty canvas construct unpredicted forms that are different from her intentions and create unexpected images depending on the materials used. Therefore, Park’s sculptural paintings are coincidental records left by the artist’s physical movements via the materials of paint and brush. They’re images of forms that are not representational of anything, rather than being part of a certain narrative structure. Park’s images of forms send the viewer back in time through which the forms are made, inviting them to imagine the body’s movement and temporality within the images.

An exhibition displaying approximately 10 works, To Counterclockwise maintains the form of a typical painting exhibition where paintings hang on the wall, while delving into the rectangular frames of the painting. And by doing so, Park sheds light on the gesture of painting and material properties of the medium, making new fascinating explorations into paintings that are material rather than narrative. 

PARK KYUNG RYUL (b. 1979) received B.F.A. and M.F.A. from Hongik University and Master's degree of Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art and Design. She has held solo exhibitions at Baik Art Seoul (2019, Seoul, Korea), Lungley Gallery (2018, London, UK), Madame Lillie Gallery (2017, London, UK), SIDE ROOM Gallery (2017, London, UK) and has participated in numerous group exhibitions at venues including Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art (2020, Ansan, Korea), Mine Project (2019, Hong Kong), SongEun Art Space (2018, Seoul, Korea), SeMA Buk-Seoul Museum of Art (2017, Seoul, Korea), Doosan Gallery (2015, Seoul, Korea), COMMON CENTER (2014, Seoul, Korea), and Willing n Dealing (2012, Seoul, Korea), etc.

DOOSAN Gallery Seoul
15, Jongno 33-gil, Jongno-gu, Seoul
doosanartcenter.com

_______________________________

Yun Choi @ DOOSAN Gallery Seoul - Where the Heart Goes

Yun Choi: Where the Heart Goes 
DOOSAN Gallery Seoul 
May 6 - 30, 2020 

DOOSAN Gallery Seoul presents Where the Heart Goes, a solo exhibition of YUN CHOI for DOOSAN Residency New York in 2019, Choi will be partaking in the residency in New York for 6 months from July to December 2020. 

Choi’s interest lies in cliché images and the sense of banality in the collective faith hidden behind such images. She captures and collects common and banal images that float around in the streets, public places and in popular culture, playing variations on them through her video, installation and performative works.

‘Where the heart goes’ is literal expression, one that is excessively mundane. The conventional notion in the word ‘heart’ gives the expression a sense of steadfastness and purity. However, in reality, the way the heart goes is at times fickle and temporal. Choi explores this space in between such cliché notion and what lies on the other side, accumulating the strange and uncanny responses and sensations that arise in such space. In Where the Heart Goes, Choi ‘posts’ and ‘updates' her works previously shown in various exhibitions since her solo show in 2017. 

The exhibition space is partitioned like an office and staged like a public building, divided into the space of ‘post’ on the wall and space of ‘update’ on the floor. Choi captures how visual power is internalized and decorated in the various posts found in subways, public offices, libraries and online communities. In between the walls of such posts, the small sculptures that take off from Choi’s works renewed themselves, enlarging into ‘vertebrates’ in human size. Finally, endlessly repeated in the center of the exhibition space are the video work NoticeRevelationLaunchClock (2020), which omnidirectionally sends out infinite digital images, and the sound work Horror Eros Vulgar Spell (2020). 

The images, objects, videos and sounds summoned into the exhibition space by Choi have all been seen or heard at one time or another. But many things that may have had an important role at one point are no longer so obviously visible, or have become an annoying sound or an eyesore. Like the heart that’s simultaneously unconditional yet fickle, Choi revives and posts up the banal landscapes that are so typically Korean, inviting us to reflect on what our society is looking at and where it’s headed.

YUN CHOI (b. 1989) received B.F.A. and M.F.A. from Korea National University of Arts. She has held solo exhibitions at Art Sonje Center Project Space (2017, Seoul, Korea), and 153th Nuha-dong (2015, Seoul, Korea), and has participated in numerous group exhibitions at venues including Platform-L Contemporary Art Center (2019, Seoul, Korea), Art Sonje Center (2019, Seoul, Korea), Arko Art Center (2019, Seoul, Korea), TCAC (2019, Taipei, Taiwan), Sansumunhwa (2018, Seoul, Korea), Busan Biennale (2018, Busan, Korea), Gwangju Biennale Pavilion Project (2018, Gwangju, Korea), Buk-Seoul Museum of Art (2017, Seoul, Korea), Kukje Gallery (2019, Seoul, Korea), and Seoul Museum of Art (2016, Seoul, Korea), etc.  

DOOSAN Gallery Seoul
15, Jongno 33-gil, Jongno-gu, Seoul
doosanartcenter.com

____________________

Donggeun Lee, Kwantaeck Park, Ji Hye Yeom @ Doosan Gallery New York

Donggeun Lee, Kwantaeck Park, Ji Hye Yeom: Tenacious Afterimage
Doosan Gallery New York
Through February 24, 2018

DOOSAN Gallery New York presents a group exhibition, Tenacious Afterimage. This exhibition is curated by 2015 DOOSAN Curator Workshop participant Hyejung Jang, and includes the work of artists Donggeun Lee, Kwantaeck Park, and Ji Hye Yeom.

An unknown thing contributes to our production of new images. In the past, people used to conceive and create an image out something as associating with old spoken stories, nature such as clouds and trees, religious sermons, myth, etc. Today, however, the media has become a powerful mechanism that provides a drive or threshold of imagination. Walter Lippmann (1889-1974), an American journalist from the early 20th century, wrote in his writing Public Opinion in 1922, that ‘because the world is too big and complex for us to experience it directly, humans form certain images of the world outside in their heads by recomposing it through limited information, that come from the media.

Now we form images through the media. However, we cannot be sure how close the image is to that truth. Because media is like an inserted medium, there is bound to be change, distortion and fabrication in between. And the transformed image often delves into our consciousness in an even more dominant and tenacious manner than its original and finally creates an another image. Tenacious Afterimage focuses on the ever more frequent and elusive transforming of the image this day when information is freely searched and collected on a personal level. Transforming not only connotes a negative notion of ‘change’, unlike in distortion, but also means to distance from its original meaning and can even connote positive changes. In this exhibition, the works by Donggeun Lee, Kwantaeck Park, and Ji Hye Yeom share critical attitude to the process of how the perceptions towards other countries and cultures, as well as historical events with limited knowledge are formed, distorted, and recomposed through the media. Based on the comprehension of the transformation of images that happened through the media, the three artists combine their experiences and imaginations to produce their own new images.

DONGGEUN LEE focuses on the outcome of imagination, produced despite the immense amount of information amidst us which makes us either blindly embody it or miss it altogether without having even recognized the information. Trace of Flight (2016), Memory of Ice (2016), and Collected Sky (2016) are his own Greenland created with the composition of collected information only through the Internet and books, and the artist’s longing and imagination of ‘Greenland’. As traversing across genres of painting, sculptures and installations, Lee explores the ‘freedom of imagination’ only possible through ‘lack of information’.

In his work Periphery of the Fact (2018), KWANTAECK PARK recomposed peripheral information, auto-associative search words, and images that obtained in the process of his Internet searching on the shooting down of Korean Airlines Flight 007 in 1983, which was the year he was born, and draws the recomposed words and images with transparent ink in the exhibition space. The mural drawings which visually manifest in parts with the help of a black light flashlight, show how information on a certain event selected and known by the major mass media is being expanded in an unexpected direction through social media and Internet search algorithms.

Through her video works, JI HYE YEOM intersects actual experiences with vicarious experiences acquired through media, blurs the boundary between, and makes us suspicious of what he has traditionally believed in. They Come, Swiftly, Stealthily (2016) demonstrates a similarity in between the essence of virus and media in the sense that they both intensify fear through invisibility. In addition, the ambiguous blurring between the direct personal experiences, recalled through the indirect experience via media. And A Night with a Pink Dolphin (2015) focuses on how the Amazonian tale is mutated and transformed of its meaning when it comes into the context of the various social mechanisms in operation today, such as globalism, capitalism, status and media.

DOOSAN Gallery New York 
533 W 25th St., New York, NY 10001
www.doosanartcenter.com