Arario Gallery is pleased to announce its participation in Art Basel Hong Kong 2021, which will be held from 19 May to 23 May 2021. Art Basel Hong Kong of this year will be a hybrid event this year with maximizing the convergence of online and offline. The physical site will adopt the 'Satellite Booth' system that keeps up with the specific time of the Pandemic era. It will act as a bridgehead where a local booth representative hired by the Fair introduces the work at the gallery booth and communicates with collectors and gallerists. Different from the on-site fair, the online fair will add various events to the Online Viewing Room including live broadcasts and virtual reality experiences under the name Art Basel Live: Hong Kong.
At Art Basel Live: Hong Kong of Online Viewing Room, Arario Gallery will present works of KIM Kulim (b.1936), CHOI Byung-so (b.1943), KIM Soun-Gui (b.1946), who led the Korean experimental art from 1960-80s. KIM Soun-Gui's Colporteur (1989) is especially worthy of its title, which combines an acoustic guitar, train, and music harmoniously with the act of 'wandering around'. It suggests many possibilities of natural encounters between human-prescribed categories and invisible areas through the act of 'Wandering' by the artist who spent his entire life working for art, writing, and educating in Korea and France.
In addition, KIM Kulim's controversial film work Civilization · Woman · Money, which was finally completed in 2016 since its starting year of 1969 will be introduced. It critically captures the lives of young people who had to swarm to Seoul, or in other word towards the civilization, in the 60s, and the phase of the time. CHOI Byung-so's chair installation Untitled 975000-3, which was first exhibited at Daegu Contemporary Art Festival in 1975 will also be presented. The empty chair in a school classroom represents the appearance of those who have disappeared in the discipline of society, and asks a role of the individual with only a trace by creating the distinctions of relationships between a speaker and an audience, and existence and absence. There will also be collages of sculptures of Japanese artist Kohei NAWA (b.1975) and Chinese artist CHEN Yujun (b.1976) who unravels the lives of Asians who have poetically adapted to Westernization and Modernization. Moreover, there will be paintings by Indonesian artist Eko NUGROHO (b.1977), and by Filipino artist Leslie DE CHAVEZ (b.1978).
Along with the online booth, Arario Gallery will present an exclusive booth for a Filipino artist Buen CALUBAYAN (b. 1980) at the Satellite Booth (1C12). His new series 'Ground and Perspective' captures the logic and the artist's philosophy about the relationship between individuals and society in the form of landscape art. In addition to landscape art, the booth introduces drawings, words, and diagrams as a result of the artist's accumulated daily thoughts and behavioural artistic practices. All the artworks, interviews, and any other information of artists presented at Art Basel Hong Kong 2021 will be also featured in the online viewing room of Arario Gallery's official website.