Kang Seok Ho @ Tina Kim Gallery, NYC - 'Hold Still' Exhibition

Kang Seok Ho: Hold Still 

Tina Kim Gallery, New York 

November 20, 2025 – January 24, 2026 

The winter sea the eyes have seen is wider than itself.

—Kang Seok Ho, Seeing, 2017

Tina Kim Gallery presents Kang Seok Ho: Hold Still, the gallery’s second solo exhibition of the late Korean artist. Bringing together Kang’s Couple and Nude paintings—created between the mid-2010s and 2021—the exhibition traces the artist’s sustained engagement with the human figure as a site for exploring painterly surface, materiality, and form. Depicting bodies and intertwined faces yet stripped of narrative and erotic intent, these works reflect Kang’s deep fixation on painting itself—and his fascination with how the effort to see and depict another contains the paradox of closeness and distance inherent in human relationships.

Kang Seok Ho (1971–2021) studied sculpture at Seoul National University and trained under Jan Dibbets at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, receiving his MFA in 2001 before returning to Seoul. His contemporaries included Park Chan-kyong, Haegue Yang, Chung Seoyeong, and Kim Beom, among others. At a time when the critical discourse in Korea revolved around multimedia and conceptual practices, Kang Seok Ho turned instead to the language of painting itself. He studied the Old Masters—both Western and Eastern—and was particularly drawn to the techniques of Piero della Francesca, Giorgione, and Tintoretto, whose treatment of color and light he admired in their depictions of skin. Yet Kang deliberately resisted virtuosity, developing a distinctive method of tapping a brush dipped in thinned paint to build up delicate, uniform layers, creating textured surfaces where pigment both reveals and mimics the weave of the linen beneath. Informed by the philosophy of East Asian landscape painting—which privileges the subjective interpretation of nature over direct representation—Kang approached every subject, including the human figure, as a kind of landscape: a terrain for exploring gesture, surface, and dimensionality in paint.

Kang’s methods, however, were distinctly contemporary, exemplified by his use of photographic sources—first explored in his Get Up series, which zoomed in on clothed torsos and buttocks, omitting faces and other identifiers. Working from photographs—some his own, others drawn from media—he isolated and enlarged fragments of images, taping off sections to re-angle and translate them onto canvas. Focusing on details such as the wrinkles in denim where thighs meet or the beads of a necklace resting against a collarbone, the Get Up paintings became Kang’s first anonymous portraits, turning the body into a rhythm of folds, seams, and reflections: quiet abstractions that reveal his fascination with the everyday as a site of intimacy.

This process of cropping and re-framing became central to his later Couple and Nude series. For the Couple paintings, begun after 2016, Kang Seok Ho focused on compositions of two figures sharing a single frame, zooming into moments of touch and proximity in photographs drawn from social media or film stills. What might appear to mark a turn toward narrative was, for him, a continuation of his formal and material concerns—now directed toward the tension and harmony between forms sharing a pictorial surface: clasped hands, entwined arms, and faces pressed together. His interest lay not in depicting two individuals, but in capturing the fleeting moments of convergence or intimacy between them.

These investigations of the body as landscape evolved into the Nude series, where the artist magnified his gaze still further, turning his attention to the texture, creases, and folds of skin. Cropped tightly on the décolletage, navel, or buttocks, these paintings subvert the conventions of the nude, lingering between disclosure and restraint. In one painting, a few strands of ebony hair splay across a softly dappled expanse of skin; in others, peaches and grapes—perhaps a nod to nudes in Western art—partially obscure the body, leaving the viewer uncertain of what is being revealed or withheld. Viewers often interpreted these works as erotic, a reading Kang Seok Ho resisted.

In the late 2010s, Kang Seok Ho pushed the compositions of the Couple paintings further inward, enlarging his canvases to focus on the eyes of two individuals. In some, two faces adjoin edge to edge, their shared boundary forming a seam; in others, one face passes another, half-visible, half-withheld. Eventually, the faces nearly overlap, merging into a single eye-like form—a meeting point of color and light akin to a solar eclipse. In his final group of Nude paintings, created for a 2021 exhibition shortly before his death, Kang Seok Ho concentrated his gaze on the belly button—the body’s physical and metaphorical center. Perhaps his most intimate works, these paintings anchor folds and crevices of skin within expanses of color that verge on abstraction.

The exhibition’s title, Hold Still, refers to Kang’s working process of selecting an image and re-framing it to fit the proportions of his canvas. This became a way of reconstructing chance, visually compelling moments encountered amid the sensory excess of contemporary life and translating these images from the immediacy of photography to the slower temporality of paint. The images, held still by the artist’s intention, become his paintings—and in turn, invite viewers to look with the same attentiveness.

 

Although Kang’s work has only recently begun to receive wider international recognition, his influence within Korea’s painting community was deeply felt during his lifetime. As an artist, curator, and writer, he helped shape the discourse on contemporary art, organizing group exhibitions such as Good Form (Insa Art Space, 2005), Manner in Korean Paintings (Hite Collection, 2012), and When Words Fail (Hite Collection, 2016). His writings on everyday experiences—plainspoken yet lyrical—echoed the tone of his paintings, reflecting an ongoing search for clarity that always left space for uncertainty.

 

Kang’s passing in 2021 left his inquiries open-ended. Yet in his Couple and Nude paintings—where forms meet, merge, or drift apart—he captured something of the fragility of connection itself. His paintings do not seek to resolve the tension between self and other, painter and viewer, figure and ground; rather, they hold that tension quietly, discovering comfort in the unsettled.

Artist Kang Seok Ho

Kang Seok Ho received his Bachelor of Fine Art in sculpture at Seoul National University, then left for Germany to study with Jan Dibbets (b. 1941) at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where he received his Masters of Fine Art in painting. After winning the UBS Art Award in Basel, Switzerland in 2000, he returned to Korea and won the Seoknam Art Prize (Seoul, Korea) in 2004, and he was the selected artist for Young Korean Artists 2008: I AM AN ARTIST by the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art. From 2003 to 2020, he held 16 solo exhibitions at Insa Art Space, Kumho Museum of Art, and Mimesis Art Museum. Beyond his artistic practice, Kang Seok Ho was also active as a curator, organizing group exhibitions featuring his peers and younger artists, as well as design shows inspired by his personal passion for modern European and American design. Exhibitions curated by Kang include Good Form (Insa Art Space, 2005), Manner in Korean Paintings (Hite Collection, 2012), When Words Fail (Hite Collection, 2016), and Bauhaus and Modern Life (Kumho Museum of Art, 2019). Not separating his daily life and art, he led meetings to interact with fellow artists on the subjects of painting, books, music, hiking, and fishing. He taught as a professor at Seoul National University of Science and Technology from 2018 to 2021, and his first retrospective, seok ho kang: Three Minute Delight (2022-2023) was held at the Seoul Museum of Art in the first year after his untimely death in 2021. His debut solo exhibition with Tina Kim Gallery was held in 2023.

TINA KIM GALLERY 

525 West 21st Street, New York, NY 10011

tinakimgallery.com

Lee Seung Jio @ Tina Kim Gallery, NYC - "Nucleus in Resonance" Exhibition of work by a leading figure in postwar Korean geometric abstraction

Lee Seung Jio: Nucleus in Resonance

Tina Kim Gallery, New York

September 18 - November 1, 2025

Tina Kim Gallery presents Lee Seung Jio: Nucleus in Resonance. Marking the gallery’s second solo exhibition of LEE SEUNG JIO (1941–1990), a leading figure in postwar Korean geometric abstraction, this presentation surveys Lee’s defining Nucleus series, which he explored consistently from the late 1960s to his final decade. For Lee, the nucleus was more than a formal motif; it functioned as a central point of perception, where energy, rhythm, and sensory experience came together.

 “I began this [painting] after the launch of the Apollo spacecraft opened my eyes to the spatiality of the universe. It feels like the most fitting way to express the era I live in, so I’ve kept working on it ever since.”[1]

During Korea’s rapid industrialization and urban expansion in the 1960s, Lee turned to a single, enduring motif: the cylindrical pipe form. Lee’s pipes are both abstract and figurative, existing as two-dimensional planes and three-dimensional forms. Although often referred to as the “master of pipes,” Lee once noted that he neither sought nor rejected the label. For him, the repeated cylindrical form was never intended to represent any symbolic object; rather, it served to expose the illusions inherent in visual perception and to question the premise of figurative representation. Through this process, Lee aimed to depict a sensuous realm stripped of symbolic meaning—a world of “sheer particles,” as he described it.

As a founding member of the groups ORIGIN (1962–) and AG (Korean Avant-Garde Association, 1969–1975), Lee helped establish the theoretical and methodological foundations of postwar Korean art. Even though his work was often associated with movements such as Mono-ha, Minimalism, and Dansaekhwa at the time, Lee developed a distinct visual language characterized by precision, restraint, and structural clarity. As Joan Kee has observed, Lee’s work reveals how he critically engaged with contemporary abstraction—a mode in which socio-historical conditions are transformed into rigorous compositional structures.[2]

The earliest work in the exhibition, Nucleus 10 (1968), was first shown at the 12th Contemporary Art Exhibit at Gyeongbokgung Palace Museum. The painting marks the beginning of Lee’s signature motif—a tubular form. This vocabulary finds fuller articulation in Nucleus 74-9 (1968–1974), in which the pipe motif becomes the organizing framework of the entire composition. To achieve the illusion of metallic density, Lee applied oil paint with a flat brush loaded with light and dark tones at either end, then meticulously sanded the surface—burnishing the paint to heighten its reflectivity and optical depth. Featured in Only the Young: Experimental Art in Korea, 1960s–1970s—co-organized by the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea and the Guggenheim Museum—the work affirms Lee’s growing significance within Korean modernism.

Lee continued to experiment with iterations of the Nucleus and develop his formal vocabulary throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Nucleus 73-18 (1973) and Nucleus 74-07 (1974) demonstrate his continued inquiry into the nature of perception, while reflecting a more subtle visual language grounded in the distilled and process-driven aesthetics of the time. Works from the 1980s—represented here by Nucleus 88-10 (1988), Nucleus 86-71 (1986), and the monumental Nucleus 87-99 (1987)—demonstrate his sustained pursuit of structural rigor, while simultaneously drawing the viewer into contemplative, illusionistic spaces that transcend the material surface of the canvas.

The exhibition concludes with the first U.S. presentation of Lee’s black paintings, including Nucleus 78-23, 78-24, 78-25 and 78-26 (all 1978). For Lee, black was not merely a color but a fundamental space of silence, stillness, and emptiness—where all elements were reduced to their origin. In Lee’s vocabulary, the nucleus signified not only the structural core of the image but a condensed field of visual and sensory perception. These works represent the culmination of his decades-long exploration of abstraction, characterized by their emphasis on materiality and process. Lee’s black paintings draw the viewer into a contemplative space where being and form quietly converge, embodying his pursuit of abstraction’s essential condition. 

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[1] Lee Seung Jio, “Presenting the Nucleus Series with Cold Lines and Blazes of Fire,” interview with Maeil Business Newspaper, October 24, 1984.

[2] Joan Kee, “Force Fields,” in Lee Seung Jio: Advancing Columns (Seoul: National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, 2020), 14-25.

TINA KIM GALLERY

525 West 21st Street, New York, NY 10011

tinakimgallery.com

Guimi You @ Lehmann Maupin, NYC - "Breath, Island" Exhibition

Guimi You

Breath, Island

Lehmann Maupin, New York

September 4 – October 18, 2025

Lehmann Maupin presents Breath, Island, a solo exhibition of new paintings by South Korean artist GUIMI YOU. Inspired by her recent solitary two-week journey to Korea’s Jeju Island, the works in this exhibition trace both the contours of the island’s volcanic terrain and the artist’s own inner landscapes. Through delicate, atmospheric brushwork and a sensibility rooted in East Asian painting traditions, Guimi You transforms Jeju’s flower-filled hillsides, lush botanic gardens, and quiet guest houses into intimate spaces of reflection and self-discovery. Breath, Island follows You’s inclusion in a number of recent institutional exhibitions, including those at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio, and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Miami, Florida.

Jeju Island, often described as Korea’s island of wind, stone, and women, holds a unique place in Korean cultural collective memory as both a natural sanctuary and nostalgic retreat. For Guimi You, its landscapes are both subject and mirror. Wandering its oreum (volcanic hills), resting beside ponds framed by blooming magnolia, or watching waterfalls carve their paths through black basalt, You allowed the rhythms of the island to shape her own: breath following landscape, painting following breath. Over time, her awareness surpassed the environment, reaching into the very experience of being alive.

Originally trained in East Asian painting, You’s understanding of East Asian pictorial traditions—where painting is not an act of depiction, but of evocation—anchors her approach. Her mark-making recalls the layered transparency of ink washes and the restrained harmony of traditional Korean landscapes, reminiscent of works like Jeong Seon’s Inwangjesaekdo, which capture not only form but atmosphere. Brushstrokes hover like mist, yet settle like memory.

At the same time, You’s years spent in the United Kingdom and United States imbued her practice with the materiality of oil painting and the structural dynamics of Western contemporary art. Her works exist between Eastern and Western legacies, and she approaches them through a lens of synthesis rather than negotiation. In her paintings, oil behaves like ink, and forms emerge with the lightness of thought. In balancing these disparate traditions, You’s paintings enter personal terrain—a space where East and West, past and present, landscape and self gently coalesce.

In Breath, Island, the act of painting is both record and refuge. Works such as Noble Silence (2025) depict the interior of the artist’s wooden guest house: a silent space that holds the sacred stillness of artistic solitude. Elsewhere, Rest (2025) captures figures lingering in a garden at the foot of Mt. Halla; here, human presence dissolves into landscape. In Pause (2025), a simple view of bonsai framed by a greenhouse window becomes a meditation on growth and restraint. Across the exhibition, traces of the artist herself—suggested silhouettes, personal objects, a figure mid-sketch—weave quietly throughout the scenes.

Breath, Island is less a chronicle of Jeju than a portrait of a painter in search of equilibrium. For GuimiYou, painting is not a destination, but a passage: a way of translating identity into image and holding two worlds, East and West, within the same frame. In this sense, her paintings function as islands themselves—floating spaces where the memories of one place and the lessons of another can meet, pause, and breathe.

LEHMANN MAUPIN NEW YORK

501 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011

www.lehmannmaupin.com

Korean Landscapes of Homeland and Longing - A Commemorative Exhibition for the 80th Anniversary of Korea's Liberation @ MMCA Deoksugung, Seoul

A Commemorative Exhibition for the 80th Anniversary of Korea's Liberation 

Landscapes of Homeland and Longing 

MMCA Deoksugung, Seoul

14 August – 9 November 2025

Chun Hyucklim 

Landscape of Tongyeong, 1992

Oil paint on canvas, 130×160cm

Tongyeong City Hall

Nam Kwan 

Refugees, 1957 

Oil paint on canvas, 160.5×130.5cm 

Private collection

Kim Junghyun 

Landscape, 1940s

Ink and color on paper, 168×94cm (×2) 

Bookook Cultural Foundation

The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA), presents A Commemorative Exhibition for the 80th Anniversary of Liberation: Landscapes of Homeland and Longing at MMCA Deoksugung.

Through modern and contemporary Korean landscape paintings, poetry, and Manchurian exile Gasa poetry, this exhibition explores the sentiment of “hometown” that has remained deeply rooted in Korean consciousness throughout the turbulent tides of Japanese colonial rule and liberation, division and war, and the subsequent waves of industrialization and urbanization.

In reflecting on the 80-year history since liberation, the concept of 'hometown' serves as a key link between this land and its people. In Korean literature and art, the “hometown” is depicted as homeland, motherland, paradise, or an object of eternal yearning. During the Japanese colonial period it symbolized a nation lost, it became the land of nostalgia after national division, and it transformed into a fading landscape during the era of industrialization. Nostalgia for home has been an enduring emotional thread running through the country’s turbulent modern history, serving as a source of inspiration in both modern and contemporary art and literature.

The exhibition is centered around four themes: homeland, affection for home, displacement from home, and longing for home. It presents an opportunity to reflect on the meaning of Korean land through modern and contemporary landscape paintings that portray the loss and rediscovery of territory during the Japanese colonial period, the separation and dispersal caused by division and war, survival amid ruins, and the hope of reconstruction. In particular, this exhibition sheds light on the diverse layers of modern and contemporary art by uncovering and showcasing works that have long been kept in museum storage, private collections, or the homes of artists' families—such as regional landscapes and pieces by local artists that have rarely been seen in the mainstream art world.

Lee Insung 

Untitled, 1930s-1940s 

Ink and color on paper, 47×36cm 

Private collection

Part 1, “Homeland: The Stolen Fields,” examines perspectives of Korean land in the imperialist era through landscape paintings that depict the country’s various regions during the Japanese colonial period. During this period, the concept of homeland was shaped by Japan’s colonial perspective, which portrayed Joseon as an idyllic and pure countryside using the style of “local color” paintings. These works were simultaneously in vogue and at the center of controversy. Other artists, however, such as Oh Chiho and Kim Jukyung of the Nokhyanghoe (Green Hometown Association) in Gyeongseong, endeavored to express the true nature of Joseon through rich variations of light and color by recognizing “hometown” as a space that inspires national sentiment and seeking to discover the unique colors inherent in the Korean land. In addition, landscape paintings by artists from regional groups such as Hyangtohoe in Daegu, Chungwanghoe in Busan, Yeonjinhoe in Gwangju, and the art communities of Jeju and Honam region reflect the distinct climates and sceneries of their respective areas. This section presents works that reflect the complex perspectives surrounding Korean land during the Japanese colonial period, alongside powerful verses by resistance poet Yi Sang-hwa; nostalgic poems by other Korean poets including Jeong Ji-yong, Baek Seok, Lee Yong-ak, and Oh Jang-hwan; and Manchurian exile Gasa poetry written by independence activists in Manchuria, which have been inscribed in UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register. By presenting these materials alongside artworks, the exhibition seeks to explore shared expressions of the sense of 'hometown' embedded in the cultural and artistic consciousness of the time.

Heo Geon 

Cultural Landscape, 1945 

Ink and color on paper, 56×48cm

Private collection

Lee Sangbeom 

Returning at Dawn, 1945 

Ink on paper, 129×256cm 

Private collection

Yoo Youngkuk 

Mountain, 1984 

Oil paint on canvas, 97.5×130cm

MMCA Lee Kun-hee Collection

Part 2, “Affection for Home: A Land Reclaimed,” explores how hometown emerged as a significant motif in the works of artists following Korea’s liberation. These pieces reflect experimentation aimed at conveying the vivid spirit of the country’s climate, terrain, and natural environment, along with efforts to incorporate traditional materials, colors, and aesthetic sensibilities. Featured artists include Son Ilbong, who returned to his hometown of Gyeongju after teaching in Japan and created numerous landscape paintings; Moon Shin, who returned to Korea immediately after liberation from studying in Japan and captured the vibrant energy of the sea off the coast of his native Masan; Lee Ungno, an artist known for his innovative approach to modern ink painting who explored diverse formal expressions in ink to capture the landscapes of his hometown Hongseong and its surrounding regions during the pre- and post-liberation periods; Kim Whanki, who forged a uniquely Korean modernism, inspired by the blue islands, skies, and moonlit seas of his native Anjwado Island in Sinan; and Yoo Youngkuk , who developed a uniquely Korean mode of abstraction through his persistent exploration of the mountainous forms of his hometown Uljin. Chun Hyucklim, who discovered a unique artistic language in the landscapes of his hometown Tongyeong, and Byun Shiji, who found his artistic identity in his native Jeju. These artist’ works highlight how hometown served as a powerful artistic inspiration. In this section, in particular, highlights how the artistic roots of well-known painters such as Kim Whanki, Yoo Youngkuk, and Lee Ungno can be traced back to their hometowns, offering insight into a crucial turning point in the transition from modern to contemporary art in Korea.

Kim Won 

Title unknown, 1954

Oil paint on canvas, 102×177.7cm 

MMCA

Byeon Gwansik 

Spring in Muchang, 1955

Ink and color on paper, 181×357cm 

MMCA Lee Kun-hee Collection

Shin Youngheon 

Suffering, year unknown

Oil paint on canvas, 35×25cm 

Private collection

Part 3, “Displaced from Home: A Land Ruined,” examines depictions of Korean land as perceived and recorded by artists amidst the nation-wide tragedy of the Korean War. The City After the War (1950) by Lee Chongmoo and Demonlished (1953) by To Sangbong portray devastated urban landscapes with a sense of desolation and quiet melancholy. Abstract and semi-abstract landscapes such as Shin Youngheon’s Tragedy (1958), Lee Soo-auck’s 6.25 War (1954), and Nam Kwan’s Refugees (1957) express the horrors of war and the memory of suffering through dark colors, rough brushstrokes, and a fragmentation and deconstruction of form. Meanwhile, Lee Manik’s Cheonggyecheon (1964) and Chun Huahuan’s The Left Behind By War, (1964), painted from a realist perspective, vividly and intensely depict the bleak reality of the era, portraying the poverty and despair of refugee settlements during the war. Artists of this period reflected on their wartime experiences to confront trauma and terror while seeking to transform and overcome them through artistic creation. Rather than depicting tragedy directly, the expression reveals the inner emotions of people reflected in the landscapes, allowing viewers to interpret these historical landscape paintings from multiple perspectives.

Yoon Jungsik

Spring, 1975

Oil paint on canvas, 41×53cm

MMCA

Choi Youngrim

Spring Garden, 1982 

Oil paint and soil on canvas, 127×191cm

Seoul Museum

Kim Jonghwi

Hometown Nostalgia, 1987

Oil paint on canvas, 97×194.5cm 

MMCA

Part 4, “Longing for Home: A Land of Nostalgia,” features works by artists who explored their own artistic worlds grounded in longing and the pain of displacement and separation due to war and the ensuing national division. These artists included motifs in their work that evoke the lyrical sentiment of their native regions and depicted their hometowns as ideal paradises to soothe their yearning. Works such as Yoon Jungsik’s Spring (1975), Park Sungwhan’s Nostalgia (1971), and Choi Youngrim’s Spring Garden (1982), which present utopian visions of hometowns in the face of losing both family and hometown while enduring loneliness, isolation, poverty, and sorrow, pose a fundamental question: what does art leave behind and what purpose did it serve in an era of such loss and deprivation? During this period, artists who shared the experience of displacement came together to organize the 1952 Wolnam Artists’ Exhibition, followed by the founding of the Creative Art Association in 1957 and the Exhibition of Gusangjeon in 1967, through which they sought to explore a shared artistic direction grounded in the sentiment of longing.

Kim Sunghee, director of the MMCA, notes, “This exhibition commemorates the 80th anniversary of Korea’s liberation by retracing the emotional resonance of hometown that has remained in our hearts throughout the country’s modernization, industrialization, and urbanization, as expressed through landscape painting. I hope it offers visitors a sincere experience of the perspectives held by these artists who captured the spirit of their times and their homeland.”

MMCA Deoksugung - National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art

99 Sejong-daero (Jeong-dong), Jung-gu, Seoul 04519

www.mmca.go.kr

Kim Yun Shin, Kim Chang Euk, Hong Soun, Scott Kahn @ Lehmann Maupin, Seoul - "Sublime Simulacra" Exhibition curated by Andy St. Louis

Sublime Simulacra

Kim Yun Shin, Kim Chang Euk, Hong Soun,  Scott Kahn

Lehmann Maupin, Seoul

Through March 15, 2025

Lehmann Maupin presents Sublime Simulacra, a group exhibition curated by Andy St. Louis. Featuring works by Kim Yun Shin, Kim Chang Euk, Hong Soun, and Scott Kahn, the exhibition speculates on the potential for landscape paintings to generate shifts in the ways that images mediate our experience of the natural environment. 

In Sublime Simulacra, the landscape serves as an inflection point for new modes of perception. The ultimate reality of images was first contested by Plato, who theorized that all representations can be categorized as one of two types: exact (“truthful”) reproductions or deliberately distorted (“false”) likenesses. Jean Baudrillard’s seminal 1981 treatise Simulacra and Simulation expanded upon Plato’s theory by introducing the notion of the simulacrum, defined as an imitation that fails to make reference to its original. In postmodern artistic discourse, simulacra are typically conceptualized as representations of representations—copies based on other copies—that do not derive from empirical experience, thus blurring the line between the actual and the imaginary. This fundamental inability to distinguish objective reality from subjective representation informs much of postmodernist thought, which polemicizes the mediation of the real through simulacra. According to Jean Baudrillard, the apotheosis of this phenomenon occurs when a representation is so lifelike that it creates its own reality, or hyperreality, effectively destroying the hegemony of the real and rewiring the cognitive connection between perception and belief.

Sublime Simulacra repudiates negative connotations associated with simulacra and embraces broader interpretations of the term as it relates to artistic engagement with the landscape. Through the visual languages of organic abstraction, geometric figuration, realism and surrealism, the paintings on view propose variable relationships between images and the realities they represent, in direct correlation to each artist’s conceptual stance and creative process. By reexamining the dialectics of simulacra through the lens of the landscape, this exhibition spotlights depictions of the ineffable as consummate expressions of authenticity.

For Kim Yun Shin, whose practice spans more than six decades, sculpture and painting have always served as distinct mediums that accomplish the same ends—namely, abstracting her impressions of nature. Whether using chainsaws and hand tools to shape solid masses of wood or brushes and paint to render two-dimensional shapes on canvas, Kim’s works convey a visual world filled with vital energy. She achieves this by attuning her own artistic consciousness with the rhythms and resonances of the natural environment, forging an almost spiritual connection that erases divisions between art and life, subject and object, representation and reality.

Kim’s paintings resist dualistic ontologies and in doing so embrace their intrinsic function as simulacra, despite a conspicuous absence of realism. As expressions of the very essence of the landscape, they operate as unequivocally evocative renderings that reproduce the sensibility of reality vis-à-vis the artist’s embodied experience, lending form to the natural order of the universe through layered compositions filled with saturated colors, organic textures and botanical structures. Contrary to Plato’s condemnation of the simulacrum as a “corrupt” copy of reality, Kim’s works effectively neutralize preconceived notions of image hierarchy by facilitating pluralistic interpretations of the cosmic energies they thematize.

Kim Chang Euk, like so many artists of his generation, progressed through several creative phases throughout his career in tandem with the evolution of modern Korean art in the postwar era. The landscape was an enduring source of inspiration throughout Kim’s lifelong artistic journey, from the geometric and symbolic abstraction that defined the first three decades of his career to the straightforward figuration of his later years. However, it was during the transitional period between these modalities, from the late 1970s to the 1980s, that Kim produced some of his most stirring renderings of the natural environment. These works evince a restrained subjectivity that suffuses their picturesque mountains, forests and streams with arresting immediacy and timeless appeal.

In shifting his purview from imagery that had little bearing on objective reality toward more clearly identifiable landscapes, Kim drew nearer to the realm of simulacra in his paintings while also retaining a certain degree of phenomenological affect. Reality and representation constituted disparate yet parallel perceptual paradigms that he deftly synthesized into a shared, simultaneous perspective rather than insisting on a single, authoritative viewpoint. As such, Kim’s abstracted landscapes do not attempt to copy the “actual” landscape, but nonetheless provoke a comparable sensory response in viewers.

In his prolific painting practice, Hong Soun appropriates press photos and strips them of their primary function by focusing on the landscapes at their periphery. These partial depictions belonging to the artist’s Sidescape series reveal images that are always visible yet remain perpetually overlooked—a strategy that subverts our habituated cognitive framework for construing an image’s meaning by cross-referencing its primary subject matter with its surrounding context. The disorienting effect of expunging a scene’s focal point is reinforced by the naturalistic aesthetic with which Hong paints the landscape and the specificity of each work’s title, which includes the date and location of its source photo. In his most recent body of work, Hong takes photos himself, inevitably imbuing his landscapes with personal memories connected to actual places he has visited, resulting in a series of painterly landscapes titled Unfamiliar Familiar Landscape. 

Throughout his oeuvre, Hong asserts the independence of images as inherently fallible configurations of signifiers that have been divested of their communicative capacity. Instead of striving to render subjective approximations of sensible phenomena or imply viable alternatives to physical reality, his paintings operate as meta-images that preclude the possibility of conflating their simulacra with the landscapes they reconstruct. This dissociation of reality and representation is particularly urgent in light of today’s highly mediated visual culture, which Hong counters by positing that the ultimate truth of an image is derived from its intrinsic unreality as a copy, regardless of how legitimate its outward appearance may seem.

Since the late 1970s, Scott Kahn has continuously developed an uncanny mode of figuration, visualizing ambiguous landscapes through precise applications of paint and subtle manipulations of perspective. This approach generates an infinite depth of focus that contradicts the natural distortions inherent in human optical perception, thereby undermining the realism of his depictions. Kahn’s signature aesthetic sensibility and idiosyncratic compositional logic—including motifs of voluminous foliage casting dappled shadows, prominent pathways and gates leading to indeterminate destinations, peculiar atmospheric conditions and abnormal variations in scale—is redolent of the liminal semi-conscious state between being asleep and being awake that elicits fantastic imaginaries permeated with surreal affect.

Just as dreams are deceptions, so too are simulacra of the highest degree, and Kahn’s paintings are no different. Jean Baudrillard categorized such illusory simulacra as simulations that conflate the real and the illusory such that they become indistinguishable and the original ceases to be relevant. Although this definition implies a negation of meaning, Kahn’s works foster new interpretations due to their ontological incongruity with the physical attributes of specific locations. Hyperreal yet untethered to the real world, they envision the domain of the subconscious, which may be influenced by objective reality but cannot act as its substitute. However, since the visual signifiers that pervade Kahn’s works directly correspond to his own personal lexicon, they remain largely inscrutable for viewers who perceive his otherworldly landscapes as divergent from their own dreamlike reveries.

Whenever the sensory response evoked by the totality of the landscape overwhelms normal perception and approaches the inconceivable, Jean Baudrillard’s dialectics of simulacra collapse under the weight of the transcendent sublime. Given the practical impossibility of reproducing the moment-to-moment impressions that lend the landscape its essential ineffability, it is no wonder that artists abandon the notion of objective authenticity in their representations of the natural environment—they are compelled to break certain rules that differentiate reason and imagination, forging simulacra that recreate reality on their own terms and invite the viewer to share in this “unreal” experience.

“The simulacrum implies huge dimensions, depths and distances that the observer cannot dominate,” reflected Gilles Deleuze in his 1990 essay Plato and the Simulacrum, which formalized the phenomenology of the sublime in relation to Baudrillard’s theory. “The simulacrum includes within itself the differential point of view, and the spectator is made part of the simulacrum, which is transformed and deformed according to his point of view. In short, folded within the simulacrum there is a process of going mad, a process of limitlessness…” Nowhere is this description more salient than in depictions of the landscape, which cannot serve as copies of reality because they manifest a mode of subjective experience that lacks a rational corollary—an ineluctable sublime. 

LEHMANN MAUPIN

213 Itaewon-ro, Yongsan-gu, Seoul, Korea 04349

www.lehmannmaupin.com

Sublime Simulacra - Kim Yun Shin, Kim Chang Euk, Hong Soun,  Scott Kahn

Lehmann Maupin, Seoul, January 22 – March 15, 2025

Artist Suki Seokyeong Kang @ Tina Kim Gallery, New York

Suki Seokyeong Kang

Tina Kim Gallery, New York

2 May - 15 June 2024

Tradition is about thinking about the present more deeply.*

—Suki Seokyeong Kang

Tina Kim Gallery presents Suki Seokyeong Kang, the gallery’s second solo exhibition of leading South Korean contemporary artist Suki Seokyeong Kang (b. 1977). Expanding on the themes that characterize Kang’s critically acclaimed multimedia practice, the exhibition includes works never before seen in New York, many of which were specifically created for her major 2023 solo exhibition, Suki Seokyeong Kang: Willow Drum Oriole, held at the Leeum Museum of Art, in Seoul (September 7 - December 31, 2023).

The theme of being present connects the diverse works in this exhibition. Kang’s practice centers on the exploration of tension, boundaries, and balance. Her paintings and sculptures negotiate a harmony between old and new, reinterpreting traditional art forms like Jeongganbo and Chunaengmu in contemporary contexts.1 References to the four seasons, works evoking sound and movement, and the balancing of near and far views create a sense of wholeness and inevitability, asking viewers to find peace and presence in the here and now. 

On view in the gallery are works from Kang’s celebrated series Jeong, Mat, Narrow Meadow, and Mora, as well as two new sculpture series, Mountain and Column. For each of these bodies of work, she has developed a distinct formal vocabulary that combines traditional techniques with specific materials to create dynamic forms inspired by Korean culture yet deeply engaged with contemporary social issues and art history. Rooted in her training as a traditional painter, Kang’s works explore how, despite our many differences, we remain connected. In focusing on how ideas of the past manifest today, Kang employs the traditional concept of “Jinkyung,” or “true-view,” painting, which seeks to represent the essence of the subject through the principle of shared symbolism. In this way, her work frames what she describes as “the beautiful moment of sharing time,” assisting us in being present in a space where “we can constantly reconcile imbalances and conflicts and achieve complete harmony with each other.”

* Quoted in Connie Butler, “The Subtle Smile: Suki Seokyeong Kang’s Sympathetic Object,” in Willow Drum Oriole (Seoul: Leeum Museum of Art, 2023). All quotes by the artist are from this exhibition catalogue. 

1 Jeongganbo is a type of musical notation dating back to the Joseon dynasty, in which the duration and pitch of sounds are notated within a square grid shaped like the character “Jeong” 

(井). Chunaengmu, or the Dance of the Spring Oriole, is a solo Korean court dance that originated during the later period of the Joseon dynasty.

TINA KIM GALLERY

525 West 21st Street, New York, NY 10011

tinakimgallery.com

Artist Gideon Appah @ Pace Gallery, Seoul - "The Play of Thought" Exhibition

Gideon Appah: The Play of Thought 

Pace Gallery, Seoul 

March 20 - April 27, 2024 

Gideon Appah 

Will You Ever be Here Again? (2023) 

© Gideon Appah, courtesy Pace Gallery

Pace presents an exhibition of new works by Gideon Appah at its gallery in Seoul Marking the artist’s second solo show with the gallery since he joined its program in 2022, and his first-ever solo exhibition in Asia, this presentation features paintings and drawings that examine memory and sensuality through Gideon Appah’s virtuosic compositional arrangements and his surrealist visual language. The exhibition is accompanied by a digital catalogue produced by Pace Publishing.

Known for his rich, jewel-toned figurations, Gideon Appah paints utopian landscapes that serve as intuitive, outward translations of the inner self. The oneiric, often coastal realms of Appah’s paintings are inhabited by nude and semi-nude figures inspired by the artist’s imaginative readings of archival imagery. Using layered impasto, Gideon Appah constructs worlds that, though visually flattened, take on a seemingly infinite breadth that is at times unsettling and, alternatively, inviting and seductive.

In the new paintings, Gideon Appah expands his expressions of memory and cultural identity through his evolving technique and renewed commitment to his distinctive surrealist vocabulary. Within his expansive canvases, life-size athletic figures find anchorage in meticulously crafted landscapes made up of careful interplays of line, color, light, and shade. Appah’s substantial and layered application of paint dissolves any suggestion of rigidity in his compositions—an effect that he accentuates by revealing areas of undercoat. Left unworked, these abstract sections of lightly washed and dripped paint give rise to almost identifiable forms from within the canvases. Further subverting narrative expectations is the apparent indifference of the figures to one another and the viewer—as if in a memory or dream, they embrace, swim, play music, and recline in states of undisturbed reverie.

Drawing inspiration for his paintings from a vast visual archive that includes newspaper clippings, family photographs, and Ghanaian films and documentaries—especially those made during a major period of cultural production after the country gained independence in 1957—Gideon Appah imbues his works with a uniquely cinematic, scenographic quality. In an act of creative reinvention, the artist transforms moving images from film for his two-dimensional works, suspending time and dislocating any sense of place in the process. His interest in monochromatic imagery is also central to his approach—for Gideon Appah, black-and-white film is not limiting but rather a perfect vehicle for investigating the expressive potential of light, shade, and hue. Guided by images he has encountered in classic Ghanaian cinema, he overlays vibrant colors onto these scenes, making them entirely new and uniquely his own.

Throughout Gideon Appah’s oeuvre, surrealist motifs abound. Disembodied heads, smoking hands, and suited torsos float alongside similarly uprooted—or unrooted—vegetation, merging seamlessly into the atmosphere of individual works. Also featured in Seoul will be a selection of charcoal drawings showcasing these motifs, marking the artist's debut exhibition of works on paper with Pace. Initially conceived as preparatory sketches, Gideon Appah now regards them as standalone works. Taking on a dreamlike sensibility detached from any identifiable narrative, these monochromatic drawings, alongside The Sensitivity of Everyday Things series—an ongoing body of paintings that explore the rituals of daily life—offer visitors insight into his imaginative process.

For a brief biography see :

Gideon Appah, How to Say Sorry in a Thousand Lights 

Pace Gallery, London , March 15 – April 15, 2023

PACE GALLERY SEOUL

267 Itaewon-ro, Yongsan-gu, Seoul

www.pacegallery.com

Contemporary Korean Art Exhibition @ Mia, Minneapolis - Minneapolis Institute of Art - The Shape of Time: Korean Art after 1989

The Shape of Time: Korean Art after 1989 

Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia)

March 23 - June 23, 2024

Jae Woo Oh 

(South Korean, born 1983)

Let’s Do National Gymnastics!, 2011

Single channel video 

Collection of the artist

The Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia) presents a new exhibition of contemporary Korean Art. The Shape of Time: Korean Art after 1989, organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, covers five themes: Dissonance, Reinvention, Coexistence, Being Seen, and Portraying Anxiety. The exhibition is on view in the museum’s Target Galleries.

The year 1989 marked a major shift in the world order, with Eastern European countries breaking away from the Soviet Union even as pro-democracy protests were crushed in China. It’s also the year the World Wide Web was invented, jumpstarting the modern era of interconnectivity. South Korea, in the wake of the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, transitioned from a long-standing military dictatorship to a legitimate democracy. An international travel ban was lifted, creating opportunities for global engagement, powerful economic growth, and cultural exchange. South Korean artists began to connect in earnest to the global art scene.

“The works in this serve as a snapshot of an important moment in Korean history, and global history,” said Katie Luber, Nivin and Duncan MacMillan Director and President of Mia. “The diversity of feelings and experiences shared by these artists is profound. I hope that visitors will leave the exhibition with new insights into the ways this historical moment echoes today.”

Using a variety of mediums, including ceramics, painting, fiber, photography, lacquer, installation, metalwork, mixed media, embroidery, and video, these artists explore themes like conformity, displacement, gender and sexuality, coexistence, and dissonance, making universal connections that offer a deeper understanding of South Korea, its history, and its culture.

The Shape of Time: Korean Art after 1989 - Dissonance

Ongoing tensions with North Korea and the effects of unprecedented economic growth have long been a part of daily life for South Koreans. The artists in this section reflect on South Korea’s past and present, the foundations of Korean society, and the paradoxes of a divided Korea. Dissonance abounds in works such as Hayoun Kwon’s single-channel video 489 years (2016). The viewer occupies the role of a soldier undertaking a daylong patrol of the demilitarized zone (DMZ), a strip of land separating North and South Korea along the 38th parallel. The work’s title, 489 Years, references the amount of time experts anticipate it would take to clear the one million mines in the area. Yet in the 11-minute single-channel video, the DMZ appears lush and filled with wildlife, the destructive potential of the area hidden.

The Shape of Time: Korean Art after 1989  - Reinvention

In the 1990s, South Korean artists began re-engaging with traditional arts and culture, infusing long-established aesthetics with a contemporary sensibility. Some of them employ centuries-old hand processes, materials, and narratives. All of them re-examine the past, addressing notions of resilience and transformation that are at once specific to their experiences and transcend geographical boundaries. Suki Seokyeong KANG’s vibrantly woven mats from 2018 and 2019, made to be used in the Chunaengmu royal dance, are inspired by Hwamunseok, a handcrafted straw mat tradition dating to the Goryeo dynasty (918–1392). These large-scale, abstracted weavings—made with Hwanmunseok thread, painted steel, and leather scraps—feature vibrant colors and abstract patterns that bridge contemporary practice with historic craft traditions.

The Shape of Time: Korean Art after 1989 - Coexistence

As Korea participated in a new level of exchange, artists embraced the coexistence of new ideas and existing Korean values and artistic traditions, imbuing them with new meaning. Yoo Eui-jeong’s Treasures of Daily Life (2018) expresses this fusion of ideas in his series of recognizable corporate logos for companies including McDonald’s, Louis Vuitton, and Hello Kitty. Created in valuable materials such as ceramic, gold, and porcelain and presented as dishes served at a banquet, these cultural icons of today are presented as valuable treasures for the future.

The Shape of Time: Korean Art after 1989 - Being Seen

The artworks on view in this section reflect the reality of the present and express hope for the future. Challenging patriarchal power structures and cultural standards, the artists center experiences that are often marginalized, silenced, or erased. Ultimately, they celebrate their resilience and that of their communities. An Attack by Green Horns, by Sang-hee Yun, is a pair of lacquered and gold dagger-like spikes worn on the front torso and back shoulder, protruding like horns. Drawing on experiences from her childhood, Yun created these spikes as a form of protection for the wearer, simultaneously ornate and ominous.

The Shape of Time: Korean Art after 1989 - Portraying Anxiety

Responding to the tensions of being part of a collective and expressing individual identities, artists have turned to alternative ways of approaching, discussing, and challenging social mores. The works in this section raise questions about group participation and the acts of looking and being looked at, while touching on larger societal challenges in Korea and elsewhere. In Let’s do National Gymnastics, Oh Jaewoo fuses nostalgia and the messaging of collectivity and its continued impact on South Korean society. In this ten-minute, single-channel video, Oh evokes the compulsory exercise program prevalent in Korean schools between 1977 and 1999. The video is set to the militaristic beat of the Korean National Stretch Anthem in a commentary on the ubiquitous pressure to conform and the associated anxiety pervasive across Korean culture.

Works from Mia’s permanent collection are added to the exhibition in Minneapolis, including Do Ho Suh’s Some/One, a 2005 sculpture based on a coat of traditional armor. Composed from thousands of polished military dog tags, the work juxtaposes the collective (represented by the armored sculpture) with the individual (symbolized by the dog tags, each representing a single soldier). Also featured is a selection from Byron Kim’s ongoing Synecdoche portraiture project, currently comprised of more than 400 panels, each approximating the skin color of a person Kim has met.

“The artworks in this exhibition respond to South Korea’s complex history and culture, which have been marked by the division of a country, political upheaval, and economic growth, all within a few short decades,” said Leslie Ureña, Associate Curator of Global Contemporary Art. “The exhibition has gathered artists who have made dynamic works that are deeply imbued with their shared artistic and social contexts. They invite us to consider the experience of exploring the past, present, and potential future.”

“The Shape of Time: Korean Art after 1989” is organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

MIA - MINNEAPOLIS INSTITUTE OF ART

2400 Third Avenue South, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55404

artsmia.org

Yi Soonjoo @ One and J. Gallery, Seoul - Mum Mom Mam

Yi Soonjoo: Mum Mom Mam

ONE AND J. Gallery, Seoul

23 February - 26 March 2023

Yi Soonjoo 

Tell Me Your Wishes, 2005-2021 

Mixed media on canvas, 70 x 75 cm 

Courtesy of the artist and ONE AND J. Gallery 

ONE AND J. Gallery presents Yi Soonjoo’s solo exhibition Mum Mom Mam. This exhibition displays ample drawings and paintings which Yi had created during a rather long window of time from the early 2000s until present. Mum Mom Mam shows Yi’s works of recent 20 years or older works but its composition is not chronological, it does not show how her art world has changed with time. Through Yi’s works that have sprung from the mainspring she had felt throughout her life, the viewer is naturally guided to sense the artist’s attitude toward life and her art world. Yi Soonjoo refuses to conform her life directions to social norms, and lives her life to the fullest welcoming every moment with joy. Such attitude in life is closely linked to her attitude as an artist and her methodology. As in our unpredictable life where we cannot foresee if we are headed forward, whether we are to stop where we are for a while, or if we should go back, Yi portrays her stories that are reactions from life in a fluid manner. Yi’s specialty is to play with reality using her unique sense of humor by secretly hiding her own code in the non-standardized screen, or surprising us with unexpected images. This delightful surprise seems to ‘poke’ our fixated thoughts which are becoming less fluid in this modern society.

 

Yi Soonjoo delves into essential issues of how to live as a human being and caresses through her paintings the emotions of desire, pain, conflict, social contradiction, loss, love that any contemporary man would feel. As these are nonverbal psychological states of mind, Yi breaks from all sociocultural norms as gender and age, resulting in drawings that have blurry boundaries. A mermaid that hides her face with a Burberry check pattern, a child with a leaf growing out of its ear, a tongue which uncontrollably spits out numerous luxury brand names, etc; on her canvas, we find figures which cannot easily be defined in language. They look like humans, but then again, they seem to be some kind of being that lives in an unknown world. Yi has taken down barriers among human, animal, plant, objects, and depicts them as beings with mutual relationships. They look like they exchange and share universal emotions and ideas which are normally issued from one’s life. As such, the artist draws these images filled with metaphors of reality, using commonly understood signs that have deeply infiltrated our society.

Since the 2019 solo show Mote Eye Beam (Obscura, Seoul), Yi has spent her time rummaging through her old drawings and paintings, observing the piled up layers as if playing with them. Yi describes this period as “raising the flashlight while fumbling through the darkness piled up with dust.” During the last 3 years or so, instead of actively creating new works, the artist observed her previous gestures while going through her old works, and newly added her current gesture onto them. Hence her works are not fixed at a point in the past, but are living the current era just as the artist does, being connected endlessly. Each work was stored in the studio and sometimes let out to receive the flashlight from the artist, slightly showing its existence to the world at some other time. At some different hour, these works clad with additional sensations signed by Yi keep on living with the artist’s life. In the exhibition Mum Mom Mam, faded old paintings that received current gesture of touch-ups such as Shyness (1996-2022), Glance (2000-2022), Life Style (2000-2022) come alive together as well as some drawings and other paintings, and recent big-scale new paintings.

At a glance, Yi’s screen depicting vague forms floating freely could seem unrealistic, but it actually portrays extremely realistic stories; some event experienced by somebody in the past, a current experience, or a plausible future scenario. Just like the exhibition title ‘Mum Mom Mam' which is a phonetic notation resembling sounds that existed before the advent of social language, we hope the viewers would face the world slowly following the rhythm of Yi Soonjoo’s drawings while murmuring something in their hearts that cannot be clearly put into words.

YI SOONJOO

Yi Soonjoo received her B.F.A in Painting from Hongik University and studied painting/drawing at Städelschule, Frankfurt in Germany. Yi is currently active both in Korea and Germany, and has operated Drawing Space Salgoo since 2014. Yi has held her solo exhibitions at ONE AND J. Gallery, Seoul (2023); Obscura, Seoul (2019); Space ikki, Seoul (2018); Take Out Drawing Seongbuk-dong, Seoul (2010); Project Space Sarubia, Seoul (2004) and others. Participated in numerous group exhibitions and biennales including those held at the Total Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul (2015, 2004); Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, Gyeonggi (2009); Arko Art Center, Seoul (2006); Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA), Seoul (2005, 2004); Aussellugshalle 1A, Frankfurt (2004); Sungkok Art Museum, Seoul (2003); Museum of Modern Art Bologna, Bologna (2001); Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju (2000); Utsunomiya Museum for Modern Art, Japan + Niigata Civic Center Gallery, Niigata (2000) and many more.

ONE AND J. Gallery

31-14 Bukchon-ro, Jongno-gu, Seoul, 03055

oneandj.com

Ci Kim @ Arario Gallery Cheonan - Overcome Such Feelings

Ci Kim: Overcome Such Feelings 

Arario Gallery Cheonan 

Through 16 April 2023 

Arario Gallery Cheonan presents the thirteenth solo exhibition “Overcome Such Feelings” by CI KIM (b.1951) featuring 60 new works of various genres including painting, sculpture, installation, drawing, and readymades.

The most striking aspect of CI KIM’s practice is the use of recycled objects. Over the years, KIM has obsessively and selectively been collecting various used items from his daily life. Spending much of his time alone as a child, KIM often found himself identifying with unwanted objects that had served their purpose and later devoted himself to the idea of breathing life into discarded and neglected objects. Through this exhibition, the artist highlights works that incorporate images and text from various print material such as newspapers, magazines, postcards, and posters.

The countless mail that the artist receives daily has long been not only a source of inspiration but also the foundation for his practice. The unique layout of each design, which act as a constant artistic stimulus for KIM, is printed on paper with varying textures that has been meticulously selected by professionals and feature images that use high quality ink alongside crisp and sophisticated fonts.

Six large-scale paintings from the coffee series, which feature cover images from popular magazines such as "Rolling Stone" and "GQ", will be presented in this exhibition. Elements of mass media and popular culture, such as the faces of celebrities including Leonardo DiCaprio, Adele, and Suzy from Miss A, combined with painterly touches fill the canvas, creating a strangely familiar scenery that draws the audience closer. Newspapers, which are discarded after a single day, play an important role in KIM's work. The pages of magazines and papers, which are initially used to prevent paint from overflowing or spilling onto the floor, are given new life as standalone works.

Sculpted in neon, the phrase "A time of suffering is followed by dreams" is displayed on the fourth floor. This work reads as a testament to CI Kim’s earnest passion in his pursuit for creativity, holding solo exhibitions each year for the past four years. For KIM, being an artist means silently enduring the growing pains as he works towards his dream. Through the exhibition title "Overcome Such Feelings," he wishes to shine a light on a series of emotions and moments of fear that experiences as he creates a work of art from an empty canvas: a common experience not only for KIM but also for many artists. “Overcome Such Feelings” invites the viewers to share this unique opportunity with the artist through various themes of dream, hope, pain, death, and survival.

In addition to the exhibition, eight types of shirts, produced in collaboration with KOLON’s menswear brand “series;” will also be presented. CI KIM, who has always had an interest in fashion has previously designed various items of clothing and sunglasses. However, for this project, he has creatively transformed each element, breaking away from the existing method of simply printing an image on a shirt. The designs feature various unique functions necessary for modern society, such as large built-in pockets for storing masks, the shortened left sleeve, which reveals the wrist, eliminating the inconvenience of having to roll it up when checking the time, and a long shirt that can be worn inside of a jacket for various events. The shirts will be available in all KOLON “series;” stores as well as in Arario’s art shops located in Arario Gallery Cheonan, Arario Museum Seoul, and Jeju. The exhibition will be held from June 24, 2022 to April 16, 2023 at Arario Gallery Cheonan.

Working between Seoul and Jeju, CI KIM has held a total of 13 solo exhibitions and has participated in exhibitions at institutions such as the Seoul Arts Center, Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig, ARARIO MUSEUM in Space, and Topdong Cinema.

ARARIO GALLERY CHEONAN

43 Mannam-ro, Dongnam-gu, Cheonan-si, Chungcheongnam-do, Korea

www.arariogallery.com

_____________

24.06.2022 - 16.04.2023

Haegue Yang @ SMK - National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen - Double Soul

Haegue Yang: Double Soul

SMK - National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen

Through 24 July 2022

Haegue Yang

Photograph by Cheongjin Keem

SMK (The National Gallery of Denmark) presents the first-ever solo presentation in Denmark of the internationally acclaimed South Korean artist Haegue Yang. Her distinctive and pluralistic worlds, expressed in works that engage all the senses, often engage with notions of movement and trajectories. The exhibition Haegue Yang: Double Soul presents a range of Yang’s original and multi-faceted works, including a sixteen-metre high suspended kinetic piece made of blinds, creature-like sculptures covered in bells, sound and text pieces, drying racks embellished with electric light bulbs and much more.

An extensive selection of works from 1994 to 2020 are on view in this show  alongside new pieces commissioned by SMK, such as a sculpture duo, Sonic Intermediates – Double Soul, inspired by the work and life of two pioneering artists in the SMK collection, Pia Arke (1958–2007) and Sonja Ferlov Mancoba (1911–1984), who, each in their own way, resonate with Yang’s artistic explorations and subjective mapping of modernities.

Preoccupied with countering reductive categorisations, Yang focuses on the entangled relations between folklore and contemporary culture, industrial manufacturing and craft, the factual and the imaginary, the quotidian and the exceptional as well as vulnerability and confidence among other seemingly oppositional and disparate ideas.

SMK - NATIONAL GALLERY OF DENMARK

Sølvgade 48-50, 1307 Copenhagen K

www.smk.dk

Boomoon @ Flowers Gallery, London - Waterfalls

Boomoon: Waterfalls

Flowers Gallery, London

Through 6 February 2021

BOOMOON

Waterfall #7803, 2017

Archival pigment print

© Boomoon, Courtesy of Flowers Gallery

Flowers Gallery presents an exhibition that draws together works from South Korean artist Boomoon's Skogar and Waterfall series. Both explore a waterfall in the tiny village of Skógafoss, Iceland, as part of his ongoing investigation into the infinite and ungovernable character of the natural world. 

For over four decades Boomoon has engaged deeply with the medium of photography, producing large format images of expansive landscapes devoid of human presence. He sees this as a means of considering perception and the self, focusing on the present moment and liberating himself and the landscape from its history and geopolitics. Since the 1990s Boomoon has referred to this activity as “photographic respiration”, a tripartite relationship that has been described by author Catherine Grout as corresponding “to a phase, a dynamic exchange between the artist, a moment in the world and (...) the image being made.” This desire for complete disassociation with the connotations of a place is what draws him to Northern countries, such as Iceland, as he believes they offer “landscapes that are the least contaminated by words and meaning." 

Boomoon has explained that he is less interested in photographs that only express the beauty or power of the subject in front of his lens and more inspired by the resonances in himself that result from his physical encounters with phenomena in the world: "My photographs are not self-expression, nor do they carry a message. They are simply the embodied result of my interactions with my surroundings." In the case of the series included in this exhibition, Boomoon plunged into the icy pool below the waterfall in order to absorb himself in the scene and gain the fixed frontal perspective seen throughout.  

The Waterfall series presents tightly-cropped lucent blue water with no horizon, drawing the viewer’s focus to the abstract beauty and shape-shifting forms created by the highly focused, celestial veils of spray and dark cascading water hitting the rocks behind. Boomoon attributes the crystalline clarity of these reductive monochromes to the stark purity of northerly light. In contrast, Skogar, a series of 300 exposures shot in black and white captures the turbulent junction between the two axes, exactly two thirds falling water and a third horizon. In this series, the waterfall appears more recognisable and highlights the magnitude and elemental force of the falling water.  

In both series Boomoon excludes all peripheral context, eliminating any sense of scale and time. This offers the viewer an immersive experience that appears to extend beyond the limits of an individual standpoint or subjective encounter. Poet and critic Shino Kuraishi believes that the minimal waterfalls dispense with continuity or a sense of passage between past and future. He says: “The destination of the end of time is permanently postponed. The waterfall keeps falling self-recursively, aimlessly, and meaninglessly carrying the undetermined present. The waterfalls descend defying associations of any other place and any other time.”

BOOMOON

Skogar #0558, 2015

Archival Pigment Print

© Boomoon, Courtesy of Flowers Gallery

ABOUT BOOMOON

Born in Daegu, Boomoon lives and works in Toseong, South Korea. Having commenced his artistic studies as a painter, Boomoon began to explore photography in the early 1970's and enrolled in the Photography department at Chung-Ang University, Seoul. Throughout the 1970's Boomoon passionately recorded the rapid transformation taking place in Korean society, looking at deserted villages and the heightening contrast between rural and urban communities. Since the 1980's he has been engaging with the natural landscape in his work as a means of self-reflection, producing large format photographs of vast expanses of sea, sky and land. Devoid of human presence, the central emphasis of his work is the experience of the infinity of nature and the representation of its presence.

Boomoon has exhibited internationally, including in South Korea, Japan, Istanbul, New York, London and Paris and his work is in the collections of the Yokohama Museum of Art, the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, the Borusan Contemporary, Istanbul and the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA. From October 2013 to January 2014, a retrospective exhibition of Boomoon's major landscape series was held at the Daegu Art Museum in South Korea. Entitled Constellation, the show gave a comprehensive overview of Boomoon's practice and confirmed his significance as a photographic artist.

FLOWERS GALLERY

21 Cork Street, London W13 3LZ

www.flowersgallery.com