axis 2017

In this second axis of the 2017, twenty works by Keuhee Shin, Rihae Jeon, and Minwook Jin will be introduced.

In the series of Sofia (a character of Umberto Eco’s “Foucault’s Pendulum”) by Keunhee Shin, there is a forest full of unknown flowers and trees painted in vibrant colors, and women wandering through the forest appear. The artist utilizes the Indian miniature painting and explores the various forms of oppressed women hidden behind the social and institutional context. The women named Sofia in the work stand as life and original being that connects the world with the world and being with the being. The artist reveals the various forms of feminity that are latent in women and discusses about the forest of Mount Sumeru that connects the woman who is revealed with another woman’s ego.

The artist, Rihae Jeon, has studied Korean painting, but her final work is expressed in the form of photography. She hangs the picture she painted in the space with the traces of life and takes a photograph again of the site as a record. Photography is the most objective entity, which is a record of past that expresses moment in time. Within that record of moment in time, information on before and after the moment, and even outside of the frame do not exist. However, in the artist’s photographs, herself co-exists in the old space, and she records another time and space beyond it.

Minwook Jin works with traditional technique of painting on silk or paper with oriental paint mixed with glue. The artist observes nature devotedly and discusses about its current relationship with us. However, the artist’s work displays modern city with building and apartments, not a traditional landscape. It depicts an ideal space in which a part of nature overlaps on the modern scene and creates intersection of reality and imagination. He continuously seeks to find his own direction in midst of the boundaries between nature and artificial, traditional and modern, and reality and imagination.