SOONIK KWON

Whitestone gallery is pleased to announce Interstice of Time: Soonik KWON at Present. Soonik Kwon is a contemporary artist who was born in 1959 in Seoul, South Korea. He graduated from Fine Arts Department at the Sejong University. His mixed media paintings and installations were exhibited more than 30 times in solo exhibitions and more than 50 times in group exhibitions all over the world. The artist’s oeuvre is in collections of i.e. Museo Nacional de Arte Contemporaneo (MAC) in Venezuela, Cosmo Art Gallery in Spain, and Museo de Arte del Tolima in Colombia as well as numerous private collections in China, Singapore, and Europe.

This exhibition shows two series works of the Artist: Absence of Ego and Interstice—Pile up & Rub. More specifically, KWON’s painting involves the technique of repeatedly applying a mixture of fine soil and paint on canvas, letting it dry, and then rubbing and piling up graphite onto the ‘interstitial space’ between the different layers of paint, which characterises both the Absence of Ego and Interstice series. In the Absence of Ego series, graphite is consistently rubbed and accumulated on the dot patterns; while the Interstice series involved filling up the gaps between the colour surfaces with graphite. The lines projecting from the flat surface of the canvas look like a series of ‘traces of events’ that have gone through the process of wound and healing. A gap is produced in the tension created by the clash of several surfaces of planes spread widely on the canvas. The black-belt gap usually sits jagged in a composition where two or more screens of different colours are facing each other. That’s also what ‘interstice’ means—to be at the present. For this exhibition, Soonik KWON also uses roof tiles to make his installation work in Whitestone Taipei.

Soonik KWON comes close to creating three-dimensional paintings by adding layers of colour on to the flat surface of the canvas, producing a relief effect. On the canvas, fine sand is layered with paint, and on top of it, raised dots are drawn with graphite, and these layers are rubbed continuously. It can take as long as a month to stack colours in this way on a flat canvas. Through this peculiar practice, undertaken in complete silence, the artist says that he gradually forgets himself and falls into a state of mind absent of thoughts. As the artist puts it, ‘Living in the ‘present’ right now, it vaguely made me think that I should not sacrifice the present for the future, and not just stay in the pain or joy of the ‘past’, but stay at the present. Although there is a conflict between the two foreign substances, colour and graphite, I thought it was a good thing to live in the present where I tried to harmonise well.’ Welcome to Whitestone Taipei and enjoy Soonik KWON’s art world.