HYUN NAHM, SIKYUNG SUNG

The exhibition title Two Tu is a bilingual play on words. Tu comes from the Chinese character meaning ‘to pass through’ (透): be that the void that opens between the melted layers of Hyun Nahm’s sculptures, or that which unfurls, fragmented, among the strokes and strata of Sikyung Sung’s paintings. While this exhibition takes this commonality in their work as its initial foundation, it also strives further, visiting the complementary relationship formed by the back-and-forth between the two artists’ perspectives and seeking the possibility of the void’s extension into spatial and functional properties.  

Hyun Nahm resurrects sculptural tradition to liberate the landscape in labor-intensive processes of construction. On the surface, Hyun Nahm’s work is reminiscent of the miniascape, a scaled-down, concentrated sample of the landscape. By conventional bounds, the landscape is horizontal and bodiless; Hyun uses industrial material such as latex, epoxy and polystyrene to revisit space and form. Reactions between the variegated matter cause them to melt into one another, overheating and entangling, breaking, opening, and swelling to be reformed as vertical, casted sculpture. This breaking of direction and reemergence into presence calls to attention the empty space surrounding it, and the holes, gaps, and voids that appear through an unpredictable process of discovery.  

Sikyung Sung’s abstract paintings manifest from fleetingly-experienced form or thought, a quality that expresses itself in the motive nature found within his canvas. Layer by layer he builds and interweaves new territories as they form and reform new relationships of colour, shape, and cognition. Likewise, it is this mutual relationship sought between the four corners of the canvas and its contained image that Sung himself identifies as the formative condition of painting. Limited by this border, outward-bound trajectory is again turned inward, direction made habitual by conscious and unconscious repetition. In this exhibition, Sungchooses not to define specific narrative or image, but to focus instead upon the empty canvas and the particular filling and emptying of its emergent void.  

Hyun Nahm and Sikyung Sung employ two discrete mediums and foci, but the new directions explored by them find similar convergence in their observations of the empty space that comes to light in the creative process. In both of their work they draw close scrutiny to its formal role, and how it functions in its emanation, while Two Tu examines its appearance in and reaction to two disparate environments.