From 29 November to 23 December 2023, G Gallery presents Thick Skin, a special exhibition featuring two notable young Korean artists. This exhibition showcases the works of Choi Yoonhee, who translates the inner landscape of the mind to paintings, and Hwang Sueyon, who transforms unpredictable materials into sculptures. The process of embodying numerous layers, created by transferring accumulated layers of time to paintings and shaping the surface of sculptures, reflects the delicate sentiments and inner emotional changes experienced by these two artists during their lifetimes.
The skin, serving as the boundary between the inside and outside of the body, not only protects the vulnerable inside but is also an integral part of the delicate body itself. Like a thick scar left in the aftermath of a healed wound on the skin, the layers of cumulated emotions that converge inward and the exaggerated protective shield that expands outward strengthen the body and sharpen the boundaries. In this exhibition, Choi Yoonhee undergoes a process of exploration that seeps inward, while Hwang Sueyon creates an armor-like surface enveloping the swollen forms. The empty inside protected beneath the thick skin, amasses the cuticles born from the wounded and fragile emotions, outward and outward.
Choi Yoonhee expresses a journey exploring the landscape formed by the traces of sensations compiled inside the mind. A body that absorbs sensations establishes a connection with the outside through inhalation and exhalation. Expanded widely through a deep inhale of breath, it is full of the remnants of old emotions that have flowed in from the outside. Choi's paintings depict a scene of sensory experience where the air explores the inside of the body through inhalation and emerges through exhalation. The layers of paint created by the stains of various colors that bloom and glide on the surface of the canvas and the tangled thread-like strokes remain like traces, portraying abstract scenery that resembles the inner realm of emotions, memories, and the passage of time. Through her work of expressing the part of an infinite landscape that is segmented but organically connected and expanded, Choi Yoonhee highlights the search points in the body that cannot be accurately identified. By doing so, she reveals the expanded inner body to the outside. Through the act of unveiling the vivid inner self and rubbing the paint to the canvas by hand to absorb the color and image into the surface, Choi's work heals and alleviates the emotions related to past time and inner wounds.
The swaying surface of the body, which seems to be solid, is an expression of a strong will to protect itself from the outside world, and it is also an attitude of flexible acceptance. The sharp metallic surface, which almost looks like it is wearing armor, is made of paper, allowing it to sway easily with the slightest movement. Hwang Sueyon's paper sculptures are made using curved rulers designed for tailoring clothes to fit the body. A stiff piece of paper cannot follow the body's flexible lines. However, the form obtained from the curved ruler embodies shoulder lines and armpit contours, intertwining with the paper's sharp edges and straight lines. Hwang uses the awkwardness stemming from imperfect combinations and the harmony found within them as her distinctive formative language. The outcomes born through the process of cutting, folding, and assembling may bear resemblance to the shapes of living organisms, yet they diverge significantly from any typical forms. The sculptures in Hwang Sueyon's 'Paper Body Series', which pursue an indefinite shape refuse to be defined, overlap and reverse the traces of the body and the surface of the material between solidity and fragility, giving volume to the flat paper and returning to the epidermis repeatedly.
Choi Yoonhee and Hwang Sueyon's works employ different visual formations, yet both share an inflated body, a surface thickened to its limit, and the remains of time accrued both inside and outside. The repeated acts of rubbing, scattering, cutting, and gluing their respective materials over and over delve into physical sensations, ultimately leaving imprints on the body with accumulated temporality. Viewers will be able to experience the energy and movement that leave traces over an extended period of time, both above and beneath the thick skin.
Press release courtesy G Gallery.
B1
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