GROUP EXHIBITION

Kukje Gallery’s Hanok is a renovated traditional Korean house originally built in the 1930s, where contemporary art and historic architecture coexist. In this exhibition, the Hanok space is not treated merely as a neutral backdrop, but as a living interactive structure that actively engages with both the viewer’s senses and the artworks on view. Each participating artist reconstructs forms, materials, and concepts rooted in the past using different media and sensibilities, questioning what inherited forms and meanings convey today within the language of contemporary visual culture.

Curated by artist Park Chan-kyong—who has worked extensively as a film director, curator, and writer—the exhibition reflects his longstanding interest in tradition, folk belief, and Korean modernity. Beginning his practice in the mid-1990s, Park explored the psychological landscapes shaped by Korea’s division and the Cold War. His subsequent work has critically examined how Korean modernity inherited and redefined traditional idioms through the legacies of colonialism and modernisation. Rather than romanticising the past, he focuses on recontextualising these vernacular practices within the shifting dynamics of globalisation and postcolonial discourse in the contemporary moment.

The five participating artists—Kim Beom, IM Youngzoo, Cho Hyun Taek, Choe Sooryeon, and Choi Yun—use painting, drawing, installation, object, and video to explore the lived experience of this ‘distance’ and trace the emotional residue left by the fading images and remnants of the past. Their works provide a critical lens through which we can reflect on the blind spots of modernity.

Rather than aiming to restore a romanticised antiquity, A Faraway Today explores how the sensory presence of these traditions resurface—suddenly and unexpectedly—within the flow of the present. The exhibition goes beyond nostalgia or traditionalist sentiment, revealing how contemporary art calls upon and modulates the language of tradition anew. It resists institutional domestication, instead bringing forth the unresolved, untamed vitality of what tradition might still become.