'Baldong'


021 Gallery will be hosting a four-person exhibition titled "Launch" featuring artists Taewon Ahn, Seunghee Lee, Eunsol Lee, and Miryu Yoon. The title ‘Baldong’ comes from the expression ‘Trigger’. While confronting this era of ‘Generative AI’ that shares the field of art and creation which was considered our humans own area, the exhibition ‘Baldong’ started with the idea of asking the fundamental question of the process of creating art for the artists in their 30s, who spent their childhood in the period where generation and consumption of image was spectacularly becoming digital. In the modern world where analog and digital, local and global, diversity and individuality are hybridized, where do they get the driving force of their work?
The participating artists of ‘Baldong’ will present their works from turning various contemporary themes which originated from digital meme and personal experience into in a variety of media, including painting, installation, and video by contemporary art which approaches conceptually with original art forms, the obligation of digital existence in the virtual space, and the exploration of the way of representing figures through painting.

Artist Taewon Ahn is establishing his own world of work by materializing digital memes. His biggest inspiration was an internet meme from the online space. Its charm of catching people’s attention regardless of its trivialness made him wonder and after exploring it he started to apply them into his works. The artist tries physical distortions and changes in real life using attained visual information. His works are expressed through a hyperrealistic method by layering the form with airbrush on a  flat or dimensional surface which is similar to ‘Texture Mapping’. The artist views the digital world as an extension of reality through his works. It is showing the boundary of reality and irreality by not settling on particular media, form and place. He is holding foreign exhibitions including NYC and presenting flat and dimensional works for the exhibition. 

Artist Miryu Yoon is especially interested in the characters among the various objects reproduced in painting and contemplates on what conditions are required to draw the characters while going through her own methods and variations. Attention is paid to formation and narrative created by characters interacting with the environment of spaces and objects and visualizes unique physical properties. The emotions that come from intimately experiencing ordinary, unremarkable objects are the basis of the work. By capturing and generating fragments of multiple narratives that emerge around a character and organizing them on the screen, the metaphorical reveal of private and abstract sensations evoked by familiar objects are explored.

Artist Seunghee Lee works with installation and media as the main medium based on his experience originating from contemporary subjects.
“For me I start from how personal experience can operate in a social context. Individual daily experiences are not a single cause-and-effect relationship, but the derivative process which social experiences lead to personal ones is focused. Through this social structural idea I bring these problems by bringing out the form which can be displaced by installation or actual structure to magnify exaggeratedly in order to convert into ‘Purposeful Deliver’. Its structure is shown by the person who sees to suggest the points which can be experienced or installing the activated space. Through this conversion, I want to operate the things that are laid on the opposite layer among things that are taken granted under social norms or to create the ‘Gap’ that can help to see things which are not visible. (From Artist’s Note)


Artist Eunsol Lee traces and observes contemporary objects that exist in multiple reality through video images through the character 'Kimberly'. Paying attention to the movement of ‘Kimberly’ that exists in virtual space, the moment of movement, cutting, and composition is realized simultaneously in the web VR environment and offline.The name ‘Kimberly’ was taken from the experience of someone hacking the artist’s Instagram in 2017 and changing the name of her account into Kimberly without noticing it for about a year. The artist continues to produce a series of projects in an effort to sustain Kimberly's existence, and uses this sense of duty toward a virtual character as a motivation for her work.The artist explores the existence value of digital objects in a digital value system in which the online economic activities of individual companies are intertwined to form one huge process.