Affirmation & Interrogation, Trilogy

The images that pearls, nails, and strings have deconstructed and Reborn paintings

021 GALLERY held an intriguing exhibition of three established artists such as Koh San-keum, Yoo Bong-sang, Hong Sung-chul under the theme of an unique property of objects.

The theme of this exhibition is 'confidence and question'. The displayed works of art have focused on a property of objects such as brilliant artificial pearls, elastic strings and hard nails in the frame of paintings.

Koh San-keum has crystallized the dynamic narration of the printed analogue text into the static visual images by using brilliant pearls.

Each letter on a text is replaced by each pearl on the canvas and the space without letters remains a blank one. Her works of art represent formative beauty like cold pixel art, digitalized after the original meaning has been dismantled and deconstructed. She added a new meaning to her works by generating visual images with physical properties of pearls through the texts out of context.

Yoo Bong-sang uses nails as a material in his painting work. After he drives nails into clearly worked images, he grinds the surfaces dotted with nails, making them uneven. The cut and grinded heads of nails meet light, displaying a mysterious shine. The shining surface of metals and the meeting of the figures and colors under it reveal an aura of his works. He creates his own unique works crossing the boundary where what exists is opposed to one another: surface and depth, clearness and unclearness, consciousness and unconsciousness, the visible and the invisible, matter and spirit, confidence and question.

Starting from the exhibition of “White Cube” in 2000, Hong Sung-chul has created experimental works, introducing a variety of works under the theme of “Solid but Fluid”. A human body is a thematical element of his works. He has created his works under theme of “String” by returning the task properties of digital media into analogue media. The overall composition of his works is a string. Although in front of his artwork we can identify the body as a solid reality seen through three-dimensionally tightly packed strings over the frame, simultaneously taking a step back, we confront the body that is dismantled and deconstructed like fluid in the loosely layered strings. In the endless process of having confidence and questioning, he expresses the physical property of the constantly shaking strings as a human reality.