Bahk Seon Ghi
Bahk’s floating charcoal works accumulate into forms that we perceive as familiar objects, delicately suspended on the edge of existence and obliteration. Likewise, the artist’s Rorschach-like speculative drawings for these sculptures, recalling the goopy intimations of lava lamps, present questions of how an object takes form through our own filters of perspective and memory.

Hwang Seon Tae
Hwang Seon Tae’s work takes the form of the ‘light box’, constructed from layers of printed and etched glass, depicting hard-edged, contemporary interiors. The box has a self-contained light source, which articulates imagined scenes. Sunlight enters through windows, casting pools and patterns of illumination and projecting shadowed forms across the silent spaces. The illuminated light is the primary element that energizes and brings life to stark scenes. The interiors are empty of people, and feel devoid of movement, except for the play of sunlight across the surfaces of the space. The spare lines and the removal of extraneous detail contribute to imagery that is immaterial yet imminently habitable. In this mostly monochromatic world, there are hints of subtle color at times to represent the exterior glimpses of nature—landscape and foliage.  

Kim Dong Yoo
Kim Dong Yoo meticulously composes paintings that are never quite what they seem. His subjects derive from his interest in world history—especially WWII and the postwar period—and celebrity culture. He chooses subjects, who have led lives different from the image they portrayed, and additionally invites viewers to impose their own thoughts and feelings onto the subject. The disparity between the subject and the image they represent is a common theme in Kim’s work, and this duality is also evident in his labor-intensive process. While his paintings appear to be digital, he employs an analogical technique, where in which he painstakingly paints—without the use of stencils, stamps, or computers—each pixel by hand. Kim’s paintings portray his subjects to a photographic semblance, however they are still a simulacrum of the person portrayed.

Yi Hwan Kwon
Yi Hwan Kwon’s arresting sculptures are the sites and triggers for cognitive and visceral dissonance. When we encounter his figures, their uncanny distortions disorient us and bring us to a pause in our trajectory. The stretched, attenuated, truncated, squashed, yet otherwise realistic sculptures are essentially beings from another plane of existence and bring to surface feelings of dizziness and giddiness. These object-images of modern, everyday people have the immediacy and energy of Pop Art, while carrying nuances of direct experiential materiality and deracinated, mediated perceptions. Simultaneously engaging art history and science fiction, they offer a poetic personal narrative coupled with socio-political analysis. As represented by an eclectic array of exemplar citizens both anonymous and archetypal, the dominant quality of modern existence is tension – between isolation and connection, individual and society, real and virtual, phenomenon and invention – in which everything is flattened, condensed, trapped, and made relative. In his illusionistic manipulations of the human body, Yi Hwan Kwon seeks to give durable physical form to a cluster of ideas about energy and cognition.