As one of the first galleries to focus primarily on young contemporary Korean artists, ONE AND J. Gallery is pleased to present the exhibition Patch to introduce the following group of artists all born in the 1990s: Yeju Roh, Soyun Bang, Sumin Song, Yeonjin Oh, and Inah Choe, from 31 March through 24 April 2022. These artists focus on the 'cracks' and 'fissures' that they discover in their surrounding environments and explore these spaces using their own unique visual languages. Fissures are not just openings in otherwise solid structures; they are also spaces of potential and possibility. Such gaps create indeterminate spaces separated from the complete whole. These artists experiment with these spaces and openings by suturing them together with their own unique approaches and perspectives, fostering change and innovation.

Yeju Roh has been concerned with the need for solidarity in our society, and they cover such topics as the anti-speciesism of the animal rights movement and human rights abuses occurring at the Hwaseong Immigration Processing Centre. Although she deals with serious topics in her works, her canvases are open and approachable, inviting viewers to engage with topics that they would otherwise find difficult to face. By applying her artistic imagination to represent physical objects from a fantasy world, Soyun Bang uses vibrant and striking colorus to construct 'something otherworldly' that is not of this reality. Sumin Song and Inah Choe explore the narratives of images and various phenomena, and they use images of various contexts to further unravel these narratives. Yeonjin Oh explores the relationship between various art mediums, including photography, painting, and printmaking, while manipulating various elements surrounding images. In this way, this group of artists investigate various gaps and factures in their surrounding environment and explore and expand them in unconventional and exciting ways. They use unfamiliar sensations and approaches to create a patchwork that fills in these cracks.

About the Artists

Yeju Roh (b. 1996) is concerned with the social role of painting, and in her works, she focuses on the struggles of those who have been exploited and marginalised. She depicts scenes of individuals resisting structural violence, such as animal rights activists fighting speciesism, the struggle of merchants at Noryangjin Fish Market against unfair modernisation plans, and masked protesters in solidarity with torture victims at the Hwaseong Immigration Processing Centre. The subjects of the paintings are depicted in unrealistic colours and possess a sense of motion, giving the viewer a vague sense of the predicaments of the subjects. In this way, the paintings imply that there is something out of the ordinary with the events unfolding on the canvas. The artist processes these very real-life emotions and serious situations with a light and unpretentious touch, allowing the viewer to experience the reality captured in the paintings on their own terms. In this way, she uses painting to foster solidarity. As she has participated directly in the scenes being depicted, and as a vegan who uses vegan materials to create her paintings, the artist is fully committed to their work, both in her everyday life and art.

Soyun Bang (b. 1992) uses striking colours to make visual the ill-defined beings she pulls from her internal fantasies. The subjects of her paintings are familiar beings, such as butterflies and mushrooms, yet, in some sense, there is something cunning and brilliant about them. She uses an air brush to build layers of acrylic particles on smooth canvases; the colours created by the overlap of pigment are exquisitely blended and composed in layers. In this way, the colours on the canvas do not appear blurred or smudged, but are instead crisp and clear, forming boundaries between the soft colours. These assembles of colour make the surfaces of the forms, emotions, and textures appear even more concrete. In this way, her initially ill-defined subjects are able to appear as exquisite characters while also exuding a vague otherworldliness that is created through the fantastical colours that overwhelm the vision and the soft boundaries made from the accumulation of particles.

Sumin Song (b. 1993) first collects images of nature, reality, and other things encountered in her daily life. Then, as these images begin to fade in her memory, she explores their after images. Images that have lost a clear narrative enable the artist to exercise their imagination, and exploiting this aspect, she reconstructs themes and images into new forms using strategies such as identify ing patterns and placing images in new contexts. In Sumin Song's paintings, there is a conspicuous presence of matter and poorly saturated colours. It is reminiscent of an image that has become weathered over time. This is because the artist paints with acrylic on the canvas, gently rubs the canvas with sandpaper, paints on top of this, and then repeats the process. Using this method, the artist is able to infuse the painting with several layers of images. The more one stares at her paintings—which contain familiar scenes of nature juxtaposed with unfamiliar images of smoke and sparks—the more one details one notices. These works, which gather various fragments in a seemingly endless chain, seem to continually expand, multiplying their significance and meanings.

Just as an archeologist unearths buried ruins and relics to illuminate the facts of history, Inah Choe (b. 1990) 'unearths' images on the canvas and creates new painterly scenes. The artist derives motifs from things she has experienced in her daily life or from narratives that she imagines based on history and myth. After drawing the colours, shapes, and textures that come to mind while exploring these narrative motifs, she then reacts with her senses to the canvas that she is faced with, and repeatedly adds and subtracts the various formal elements of colour, lines, planes, and transparency. In particular, most new works being presented at the exhibition Patch use a limited colour palette compared to her earlier works, and, therefore, the relationship between the formative elements of lines and planes as well as her painterly sensibilities are made more distinct. In this way, through the interaction of various coincidences as well as improvisational actions and interactions, various fragmented elements are gradually and organically woven into the canvas, creating a new painting and rhythm.

Yeonjin Oh (b. 1993), who organically manipulates conditions surrounding the image, explores the relationship between various images and mediums, such as photography, painting, and printmaking, and navigates their interrelationships. At this exhibition, we introduce her series 'Over All' (2021–ongoing), which was created by enlarging a section of her earlier drawing series 'Solitaire' (2021) on a screen-printing film. For the drawing Solitaire, the artist intentionally avoided conventional supports for the painting such as canvases and chose to use partially translucent film paper, which does not hold much paint. She then conjured up the motifs, images, and gestures that came to her memory to spontaneously paint in oil. Yeonjin Oh does not stop at experimenting with mediums. After extracting a small section of Solitaire and enlarging it, she adjusted the intensity of light, exposure time, and other conditions related to photography, and printed it as a Chromogenic print which is titled Over All. The surface of Over All, which is imbued with highly saturated colours and a vivid sense of movement, reveals an image that reflects the various processes of manipulation the work has undergone. At the exhibition Patch, visitors can search the surface of work for hints that allow us to trace back this process of work. The series 'Over All' invites the viewer to speculate over what the original work (painting) may have looked like, and what processes and transformations it went through to produce this result (photography); in this way, Yeonjin Oh invites viewers to speculate over the transformation of a one medium to another, or in this case, a photography into a painting.

Press release courtesy ONE AND J. Gallery.