Explorations beyond Boundaries is a title that implies the creative process artists who cannot settle in one place and always have to find new things attentively. Each of the four emerging contemporary artists in the exhibition shows the process of embodiment. They work beyond the dichotomous boundaries between painting and sculpture, plane and solid, abstraction and figuration, and temporality and spatiality, randomly and selectively materializing them in their works.
The shaped canvas movement of the 1960s erased illusions of the canvas and investigated the complete flatness by revealing materiality. In LEE Mijung's works, it has been transformed into thick canvases that blatantly expose interior design elements, disguise themselves as ornaments, and often stand by themselves like sculptures, away from the gallery wall. LEE's paintings are often realized as a physical space outside of the plane. Through the variability of turning into several modules and different forms, they present the possibility of infinite expansion beyond painting and sculpture. However, the artist represents the ideal landscape and interior design with extremely simplified images and emphasizes that her paintings are merely flat planes that have nothing to do with all of such functions. As such, she does not provide a clear answer as to whether her works are sculpture or painting.
In her works, LEE Jungmin presents movements that are so precise and sophisticated that it is difficult to believe that she has created them using software for document creation. Instead of showing her works as completed entities, the artist unfolds the beings inside her pictures in her time, revealing the process of image formation. The time of the objects in her works, which she explains as 'relative time,' flows at a slow or fast pace. It exists somewhere between digital and analog, moving at a different pace from the absolute time that exists outside of her works.
In JUNG Jin's works, simple cartoon characters and dense pictorial landscapes coexist. They move back and forth between fantasy and reality, adding the sentiments of chaos and anxiety with vibrant colors and cartoonish effect lines crossing the canvas. The multi-layered images on the canvas seem to present the possibility of iconographic interpretation. However, the artist returns to her experimentation with the flatness of painting through her cut-out planes she calls 'relief-like planes.' The thin physical layer of paper emphasizes that painting is only a thin plane on which an image is drawn. Yet, it ironically implies that there exists a space in another dimension under the cut-out and the canvas, which presents the possibility of expanding the painterly plane.
PARK Kyung Ryul explains that his works are 'sculptural paintings' that work beyond the boundary between sculpture and painting. In her works, actual objects appear outside the canvas or exist as images on the canvas. They often appear entirely as abstract canvases. However, the artist's experiments always do not deviate from her concept of sculptural painting. While she experiments with the flatness of painting, she also talks about sculpture through the accumulated physical layers of paints on the canvas as a space. By doing so, she arrives at the concept of 'sculptural painting.'
Press release courtesy G Gallery.
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