ONE AND J. Gallery is pleased to announce its participating in Art Basel's first iteration of Online Viewing Rooms presenting the artists Kang Seung Lee, Jung Lee and Han Jin. At the exhibition, the gallery will introduce these three artists with the keywords "the way of recording memory". Since memories are devoid of substance, people record them. At this point, records become physical entities that replace memories.
For three years (2016–2018), Kang Seung Lee has visited garden at Prospect Cottage built near Dungeness Beach in Kent. This is the private garden of the British film director and activist Derek Jarman who designed and tended the garden himself for several years before his death. Over his visits invited by Jarman's partner, Lee collected plants, soil, rocks, scrap metal, discarded wood and other similar materials that Jarman combined to make pieces in his garden. The materials that Lee collects are used in his drawings and embroideries as well as recording memories from Jarman's works and essays on his garden planning. The life and traces of Jarman carved through Lee's labor- intensive work serve as a memorial of an activist who resisted social stigma and homophobia. ~~
Concurrently, Lee looks to the life of Korean gay human rights and AIDS activist Joon-soo Oh. Lee remembers Oh's life by reproducing his diaries, letters and poems in drawings and embroideries and recording the lives of individuals who have made sustained resistance in society. In his drawing〈Untitled (Derek Jarman at the Prospect Cottage)〉, Lee continues his on-going series of graphite drawings addressing how bodies (as marked by difference) are represented in moments of pandemic and social unrest. The figureless image conjures the departed while alluding the presence. Likewise, the hammock-shape sculpture provides a place of rest - the hemp fabric embroidered in gold thread with a pattern appropriated from the curtain at Prospect Cottage. There is brevity to the summation, imagery both heavy and light—evoking absent bodies, yet also the presence manifested: all that remains.
Han Jin has her interest in the process of materializing the purpose of various velocities and halting of vision and aural on a flat structure. Especially, the very object that was the source of the influence for a prolonged period of time eventually disappears, but the remaining vestige gazes at the object embedding 'aural texture' among the many condensed subjects. This is visualized by the process in which the continuing accumulation of condensation and erasure of materials form multiple layers and strata.
These may but only be expressed as the artist's memories, but they are also those which exist somewhere in some point of time that we also live in; thus, the artist states that her images are "representations" with distinct subjects. To express them, Han traces, explores, and depicts the subject to the limit-which is also an attempt to bodily represent a landscape inscribed in the body and to approach the certain point that the representation takes place in person. The artist eventually let goes of her brush at the moment when everything that only the artist knows becomes exposed. This enables the viewers to get access of the landscape the artist represented, and at last, perceive them inside the time of present.
Jung Lee is well known for her work in photography and installation. Though trained in photography, Jung Lee describes her interest as one conceptually grounded in the limits of language, and how language operates as an image. Lee is best known for her photographs of text-based light installations set directly into the landscape. Her series are grouped by the texts they reference or sources. "Aporia" (2010-2011), for example, takes motifs from Roland Barthes's A Lover's Discourse, and culls expressions of love and hatred from TV, internet forums, and popular movies. In previous series, Lee used phrases and slogans from North Korea and placed these on the country's desolate border to South Korea; in another, she places extracts from her interpretation of Dante's Divine Comedy over bodies of water such that the lights create reflections. In the Art Basel Hong Kong 2020, ONE AND J. Gallery seeks to look at the work of Lee in the relationship between the memory and records, the opaque and inscrutable image, and the text that was born to record and store it. The relationship between memory and record is in fact not one-on-one, and it is bound to be deleted or distorted and left far from the detailed memories of individuals. This is also found in the opacity and inconsistency between images and text shown in Lee's work, reminiscent of an interruption in memory and records.
Artists' Biography
Kang Seung Lee (b.1978) is a multidisciplinary artist who was born in South Korea and now lives and works in Los Angeles. Lee has had solo exhibitions at ONE AND J. Gallery, Seoul, South Korea (2018); Artpace, San Antonio, TX (2017); Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles, CA (2017, 2016); Los Angeles Contemporary Archive, Los Angeles, CA (2016); Pitzer College Art Galleries, Claremont, CA (2015); Centro Cultural Border, Mexico City, Mexico (2012). Selected group exhibitions include Participant Inc., New York (2019); Canton Gallery, Guangzhou, China (2018); LAXART, Los Angeles, CA (2017); DiverseWorks, Houston, TX (2017); Centro Cultural Metropolitano, Quito, Ecuador (2016); SOMArts, San Francisco, CA (2014); Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA (2014); and Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC (2012). Lee is the recipient of the CCF Fellowship for Visual Artists (2018-19), the Rema Hort Mann Foundation grant (2018), and Artpace San Antonio International Artist-in-Residence program (2017). His work has been reviewed and featured in Artforum, The New York Times, Frieze, New York Magazine, Artnet, LA Weekly, Hyperallergic, among others. He received an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts)
Han Jin (b.1979) holds BFA and MFA degrees from Department of Fine Arts, School of Visual Arts, Korea National University of Arts. Han has had solo exhibitions, 'Black Ice' (Gallery Chosun, Seoul, Korea, 2018-2019), 'White Noise' (Art Space Pool, Seoul, Korea, 2016), 'Sound from a Distant Space' (Cheongju Art Studio, Cheongju, Korea, 2015), 'dim. Garden' (DM Gallery, DM Art Center. Seoul, Korea, 2015). She had participated in group exhibitions such as 'Courage and Poem' (ONE AND J. Gallery, Seoul, Korea), 'The Use of Sensation' (space K, Gwacheon, Korea, 2019), 'Before Form' (Gallery Kiche, Seoul, Korea, 2018), 'Gyeonggi Archive_NOW, GMoMA Special Exhibition' (Gyeonggi Sangsang Campus, Suwon, Korea, 2018), 'the CONVERSATION' (Artside Gallery, Seoul, Korea, 2018), 'Inside Out' (Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, Ansan, Korea, 2017), 'Art 50*50' (Art Sonje Center, Seoul, Korea, 2016), 'The traces of 10 years, The future of the 10 years' (Cheongju Art Studio, Cheongju, Korea, 2016), '24 Night, 25th Day' (Cheongju Art Studio, Cheongju, Korea, 2016), 'Spuit' (Ahsh Gallery, Paju, Korea, 2016), 'On the Island' (Burgeum Gallery, Jeju, Korea, 2015), 'The Grass Rises' (Art Space Pool, Seoul, Korea, 2015), 'Outside of Gray Zone: Mihye Cha, Jin Han' (Art Space Pool, Seoul, Korea, 2014), 'Drawn to Drawing' (Gallery 175, Seoul, Korea / NAKAI Gallery, Kyoto / KAZE Gallery, Osaka, Japan, 2013), 'Thinking of SARUBIA' (LEE HWAIK Gallery, Seoul, Korea, 2012), 'Creating Friendly Co-Existing Relationships' (K-Arts Gallery, Seoul, Korea, 2012, 'Testing the Water' (Showroom, Arnhem, Netherlands, 2011), 'Fantastic Reality' (B2 Project Gallery, Seoul, Korea, 2011) and 'Departure from an Accustomed Place' (Eve Gallery, Seoul, Korea, 2011). Selected for 2018 Gyeonggi Cultural Foundation Visual Art Support Funds. 2017 Gyeonggi Cultural Foundation Visual Art Support Funds. 2016 Seoul Cultural Foundation Visual Art Support Funds. 2015-2016 Cheongju Art Studio Residency Artist
Jung Lee (b.1972) was born in Seoul, Korea and now lives and works in Seoul. Lee holds BA degrees from Kent Institute of Art & Design, Kent, UK and MA degrees from Royal College of Art, London, UK. Lee has had solo exhibitions at ONE AND J. Gallery, Seoul, South Korea (2016, 2013); Green Art Gallery, Dubai, UAE (2013). Selected group exhibitions include Flying Texting at Dohing Art, Seoul, Korea (2019); #Meterial4.0 at Galerie Stadt Sindelfingen, Sindelfingen, Germany (2018); The Anti-Art Museum Show, K Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul, Korea (2017); Meta-scape, Wooyang Museum of Contemporary Art, Gyeongju, Korea (2017); The Secret Garden, Seoul Museum, Seoul, Korea (2016); Selected EDITION: Art & Design, Shinsegae Centum City Gallery, Busan, Korea (2016); Korean Contemporary: Fusion, Galerie Ron Mandos, Amsterdam, Netherlands(2015); Sovereign Asian Art Prize, Rotunda, Exchange Square, Hong Kong(2014); International Foto and Media Triennial, Villa Merkel Gallery, Esslingen, Germany(2013); Photographic!: Daegu Photo Biennale, Daegu Culture and Arts Center, Daegu, Korea(2012); A Postcard from Afar: North Korea from a Distance, Apexart, New York, USA(2012); Terra Incognita, International Incheon Women Artists' Biennale, Incheon, Korea(2011). Jung received prize at Finalists, Sovereign Asian Art Prize, Sovereign Art Foundation, Hong Kong (2014); Hoopers Gallery Awards, Royal College of Art, London, UK(2005); Matthews Wrightson Awards, Royal College of Art, London, UK(2005)