AXIS 2023

 The 'AXIS' exhibition held every year at the 021 Gallery is a young artist project.

‘AXIS 2023’ is in its 8th year this year. This exhibition is a planned exhibition which seeks to become a foundation for creative activities of talented new artists to devote themselves to their works. AXIS exhibition seeks to be a place for artists from various regions, including Daegu, to expand the scope of exhibitions and work activities by exchanging with each other beyond the region where they are based.

This year, ‘AXIS 2023’ will be held as a 4 person exhibition in the Beomeo Hall and 1 person exhibition in the Sangdong Hall.

Beomeo Hall is joined by artists Minhee Kim, Nosik Lim and Seongjoon Hong who strive for ‘drawing’ as painting and figuration, and metal craftsman Glory Kim, who pursues diversity of beauty through grotesque aesthetics.

 

 Artist Minhee Kim mainly brings images from Japanese animation, cartoons, and games in the 1980s and 1990s as sources for her work. The images of female characters consumed by the public from the past to the present are drawn in her own way, and she works to twist the typicality of female representation by bringing the facial shapes that existed in the past into the present face with self-consciousness and desire.

 

“I like the word ‘Futro’. It is also an expression that transcends the distinction between past, present and future. I value the future, not ‘retro’. It is my goal in my work to derive some futuristic yet realistic power from the original image, which is often the object of nostalgia.”

- From the Interview Article

 Artist Glory Kim focuses on changing the realm of ugliness into ‘beauty’, and presents metal craft work that draws out shapes by disassembling or distorting objects through his unique impromptu and rough hammering. In the realm of craft, one can encounter installation works that aim to expand craft by claiming non-craft elements.

 

“Ugliness is something that evokes an unfamiliar feeling out of universal beauty. Then, wouldn't it be possible to see that ugly means new? Furthermore, can we expand beauty by accepting ugliness? These questions are the foundation of my work, and I work with inspiration from grotesque aesthetics with the idea that various beauties should be respected. By utilizing organisms and human body distortions and recombinant elements in my works, I pursue work that expands the realm of beauty through ugliness. In addition, I want to expand the craft through non-craft elements, such as minimizing functions, expressing intuitiveness, hammering, and using welding as an excessive texture.”

- From the Artist’s Notes

 

 Artist Nosik Lim works by keeping a distance from objects or phenomena in the process of embodying images collected in everyday life into paintings. “Everything is finely connected to that place, and the more you focus on each, the more distant you are from that place.” (From the Artist’s Note)

In the repeated process of drawing and erasing the entire screen on the canvas, the thin layers pile up and flow down, and the emptied landscape transforms into unknown shapes and forms that erase the delicate borders of achromatic colors.

 

The further you are from the place (there) and the thing (pictorial space) the closer you can get. There is something where there should be nothing, and there is nothing where there should be something. By the time it is perfectly adjusted, everything will be back to where it belongs.

- From the Author's Writings

 

 Artist Seongjoon Hong works on the theme of ‘Layers’, where he collages and reinterprets exhibition halls or daily scenes with his camera on canvas, and thinks about another color to put on top of while drying and piling up acrylic paint. The artist cuts off the metaphysical approach to painting and focuses on the act of painting itself. The subject matter of the work begins with photos of water, natural objects with sky, or landscapes taken by himself. Simplifying these materials into colors, he piles them up like colored paper on the canvas. The clouds and soap bubbles in the sky are scenes that actually existed, but they are drawings projected by the artist's illusion.

 

“The works until 2018 and 2019 have changed from the focus of the act to the consideration of the screen and the object itself. This made me focus more on what people want to see in the line of sight, which led to concerns about the screen itself. Trying to use the collected photos as formative elements of the work eventually led to expressing of the digital screen layer as a painting. In this ‘Layers’ work, the method of collecting through the camera and the collected images are used as they are, but the composition itself has emerged as a concern about the layers of painting and the basic physical properties. In particular, the painting expressed on the canvas maximized the layer and flatness of the shadow with the airbrush technique.”

- From the Interview Article