Korean artists presented by international galleries at the Frieze Seoul and Kiaf Seoul at COEX, September 2024.
Seoul-based artist Cho Sung-Hee combines a traditional Korean sensibility with her unique vision and personal narrative. In constructing the surface of her works, Sung-Hee uses a collage method in which many circles are hand-cut or gently torn from traditional hanji paper, then layered with oil pigments and placed one atop another. The intricacy of the artist’s creative process ultimately mirrors both the intricacies of nature and the human mind.
Known for her multi-sensory approach to art making, Korean artist Anicka Yi’s work Skeletons All The Way Down consists of a high-density foam panel with a lustrous chrome finish, the wall-mounted panel recalls a paleontological archaeological find.
The overlapping, smothering, cross-hatching forms of the Precambrian Panels imagine the wild short-lived pathways of early evolution on the planet. Coated with a distressed chrome effect invoking machines of the industrial age, the Precambrian Panels dash ancient and modem fossil records.
The Translated Vase series by artist Yeesookyung consists of sculptures reconstructed from discarded ceramic fragments. She pieces together the ceramic shards which have been discarded by Korean Masters, with gold over the cracks.
In this work, various ceramic fragments reproduced from all periods and areas of Korea are used, including those from North Korea. Many of these fragments are created during the destruction of pots which the ceramic Masters deem to be unworthy, and the artist fabricates new narratives with her translation of the pieces to form an infinite proliferation which is no longer fragile.
Drawing upon traditional East Asian philosophical and aesthetic principles, Lee Kang-So has developed an intuitive and embodied approach to artmaking. Liberated from set intent or meaning, his works are instead conceived as sites of creative participation between artist, object and audience.
They come from the artist’s serenity state and are, as the artist emphasizes, a series of coincidences, rather than an intentional outcome. “Whether in painting or sculpture, I wish for all works to form a structure where some pure energy in myself and that in the onlooker can mutually interact,” states Lee Kang-So.
Ha Chong-Hyun’s painting is a result of meditation that takes the viewers into a state of meditation too. 2024 marks fifty years since he began the "Conjunction" series in 1974.
Ha Chong-hyun thus became one of the main exponents of an informal group of Korean artists whose work was later named Dansaekhwa, or “monochrome painting”, which developed after the Korean War, in the 1970s, when artists sought change in society and turned to abstraction.
Born in South Korea, Lee Ufan in the late 1960s was a leading figure of the Japanese avant-garde group Mono-ha. His artistic practice, which emphasizes the relationships between space, perception, and object, developed from his deep appreciation for nature and materiality.
The artist’s most minimalist series, Correspondence, began in 1993. By mixing crushed stone into the pigment, he creates a dense opacity giving the paintings an evermore mysterious, meditative and illusive dimension.
Jin Meyerson is an artist recognized for his dynamic and emotionally charged paintings that explore themes of transformation, identity, and displacement within the human experience. Drawing from his personal history as a Korean adoptee in the USA, and his eventual return to his homeland as an adult, his sense of self has influenced his oeuvre.
His artwork blends surrealism and expressionism to reflect the fluid nature of human consciousness and the impact of personal and collective experiences on identity, which is emphasized by the work bearing the name of the South Korean dystopian survival thriller series.