axis 2017

Through the project “axis 2017”, we intend to select promising young artists who are full of possibilities, inspire their creativity, and seek for future directions for further development together. axis means ‘center,’ and it will serve as a central axis to discover new artists that will lead the contemporary art and to spread them widely. In this axis 2017, twenty works by Sejin Kwon, Suyeon Park and Hyeonuk Cha will be introduced.

Sejin Kwon dilutes acrylic paints with water and paints thin layers on the paper to portray an image. This repeated brushing creates a fold of time, destroys the shape, and makes luster of the color disappear. It conveys a nostalgic feeling as if it were taking out an old, dimly lit photographs. In a recent work that the artist is working on, we can discover another aspect of our lives that we cannot remember within the extended history, not within personal history. The figure is partially depicted as a glimpse of time, and it is combined again to form a screen, to show as if something that did not exist in the past exists now.

Suyeonn Park expresses the scenery of her dream world, which does not exist, with acrylic paints on paper with the basis of her inner experience in real life. The delicate yet surreal space is a place that humans never have experienced and seems to completely reject human approach. Sooyun’s painting begins with her questions on the relationship between herself standing at the edge of the cliff and the “ultimate existence,” and constant questions created around the nature, which is in between the two. The artist projects her obscured self-image as a vague image in a strange yet tranquil landscape that does not exist anywhere.

Hyeonuk Cha utilized the traditional technique of oriental painting, ink stick, to express the hidden story of every scenery around him. The composition of the work is covered with traditional ink painting, but there is no sense of traditional landscape painting. The abstract image fills the screen as the lines and sides of the ink intersect, just as Cubists painters split the surfaces of the object. The artist thoroughly breaks down the shape of the object and freely adjusts the broken pieces again like a puzzle. This is an abstract expression that utilized the characteristics of ink stick and it is a new challenge of ideological landscape that deviates from the traditional method of reproducing nature as it is.