Kukje Gallery will participate in Frieze Viewing Room Los Angeles Edition 2022, running from 15 through 20 February 2022. While the physical fair is reopening after the cancellation of its previous edition due to the pandemic, Frieze Viewing Room continues to play an important role providing an international platform and interactive space for audiences to experience the vibrant cultural scene of Los Angeles. Kukje Gallery will only participate in the online version of the event—which will host 101 galleries from 16 countries—this year, and they look forward to the premiere of Frieze Seoul in September of 2022, alongside KIAF SEOUL and in partnership with the Galleries Association of Korea.
Kukje Gallery's virtual booth for Frieze Viewing Room Los Angeles Edition 2022 will feature works by both Korean and international contemporary artists. This selection will include important pieces by celebrated Korean artists such as Kim Yong-Ik's Thinner...and Thinner...#16-31 (2016), an exemplary piece from the artist's iconic series of 'dot paintings.' Kim is one of the central figures in Korean modern and contemporary art history, having developed a unique philosophy and studio process whilst maintaining an independent stance amidst Korea's dominant artistic movements—from modernism and conceptualism in the 1970s to the Minjung (populist) art movement of the 1980s—and has inspired subsequent generations of Korean artists to pursue a similar spirit of originality and nonconformity. Also on view will be the Korean contemporary artist Gimhongsok's 8 Breaths (2019) from a series of sculptures consisting of cast bronze balloons stacked on top of each other to form a column. Varying in size, these balloons are blown up by the artist's friends and acquaintances before being cast, a process that signals a symbolic transformation of their breath into the final object. The presentation will also highlight the contemporary artist Haegue Yang's Sonic Gym – Milky Coiffured Cosmic Compression (2019), a hanging sculpture covered with plastic twine and nickel plated bells that generate unique visual patterns and acoustics when manually activated. Opening on 5 March, the artist will be the subject of a major solo exhibition titled Haegue Yang: Double Soul at the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen, Denmark, which will bring together an extensive selection of the artist's work.
Alongside these works by prominent Korean artists will be a selection of works by international artists including the Swiss contemporary artist Ugo Rondinone's the moon (2011), which comes from a series of cast bronze bird figures whose surface is covered with the artist's fingerprints, preserving the fleeting process of creating the work and addressing the transience of time. Opening on 5 and 7 April 2022, Kukje Gallery will mount its third solo exhibition of Rondinone in the gallery's Seoul and Busan spaces respectively, marking the artist's first solo showcase in Busan. Also on view will be the Scandinavian artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset's City in the Sky (2019), an installation that creates a kaleidoscopic overview of a fictional cityscape inspired by financial centers in megacities around the world. Installed upside-down and suspended in a large armature under which the viewer can gaze upwards at the illuminated skyscrapers, the work prompts its audience to imagine their own ideal city. City in the Sky belongs to the duo's series of works that reflect their interest in urban architecture, which includes the commissioned site-specific, permanent installation titled The Hive (2020) in New York's iconic Pennsylvania Station and the permanent commission _Magic Mushroom_s (2015) for the public library DOKK1 in Aarhus, Denmark.
The virtual booth will also include the Danish artist collective SUPERFLEX's The Show Must Go On (2019), a familiar colloquial phrase recreated as an LED sign that riffs on commercial advertising and invokes reflections on the meaning and reach of cliché in popular culture; and the Thai artist Korakrit Arunanondchai's Painting with history (The moon is a camera, smile at it, let the Hunger Games begin) (2021), a painting that uses the artist's signature medium, denim on canvas, to critically respond to the ubiquity of the material and with issues around the importation and appropriation of western culture in Asia. Kukje Gallery announced the representation of Arunanondchai last year and will hold his first solo exhibition at the gallery towards the end of this year.
Currently on view at Kukje Gallery Busan is Life, a solo exhibition of the acclaimed Korean painter Sungsic Moon. The exhibition demonstrates Moon's unique painterly language and introduces approximately 100 new 'oil drawing' works which involve a process where the artist uses a pencil to carve and draw directly onto the impasto surface of wet paint. The show will remain on view through 28 February 2022.
Kukje Gallery will mount an extensive solo exhibition of the pioneering Dansaekhwa master Ha Chong-Hyun on 15 February 2022, spanning all three spaces of the gallery's Seoul branch. Ha's third show with the gallery will introduce works from the 1990s to the present and will include works from Ha's signature 'Conjunction' series with an emphasis on recent multicolored pieces, as well as mark the first ever showcase of new works from the artist's Post-Conjunction series.