Installation view of 《Objects in Time》 © Atelier Aki

Lee Mijung, who has explored contemporary universal sensibilities through the experimental format of “assembled painting,” presents new works in this exhibition that take objects situated within time as their motif. The works unfold through Window and Frame, which the artist has consistently explored, as structural devices.

Elements that carry temporality, such as light, stars, and the flow of a day, are assembled within the image together with objects, while the frame functions beyond a simple boundary as a structure that composes “time within the frame.” Here, the window and frame are not devices that fix a scene, but expand into structures that organize a space where different time zones coexist.

This structure becomes even clearer in a work where a high table with a glass of alcohol and a low table with snacks are juxtaposed within a single image. The glass on the high table suggests adult time, while the low table suggests a child’s time, and different rhythms and perspectives of life intersect within one scene without hierarchy.

The different heights of vision and the arrangement of objects overlap the two time zones rather than separating them, and objects are transformed from mere things into elements that mediate memory and experience.

Lee Jungwoong’s still lifes, which have reinterpreted the classical genre of still life through a contemporary sensibility, are quiet but not static. They are not reproduced objects, but representations selected and given meaning after passing through time and illusion, and the image functions not as a place where objects are placed, but as a structure where different worlds and time zones overlap.

Installation view of 《Objects in Time》 © Atelier Aki

Through the series presented for the first time in this exhibition, the artist reconstructs still life within the conceptual framework of the “Cabinet of Curiosities,” or Wunderkammer. Objects are no longer simple subjects, but take their place as a collection in which the artist’s thought and taste, and the processes of collecting and selection, are condensed.

In the work The Bird-Footed Fish, the Swan Head, and Ranunculus, the bent neck and wings of a hunted bird meet the curves of a withering flower, suggesting the boundary between life and extinction. A fish that seems to have been drawn up from the abyss takes its place as a hybrid being that crosses the boundary between reality and imagination.

Just as the bestiary, an illustrated manuscript in the form of a medieval animal encyclopedia, sought to understand the world by merging the real and the imagined, Lee Jungwoong’s images also operate as sites where reality and illusion intersect. His work is a process of revealing the accumulation of time through dense observation.

The color of petals slowly changing according to the angle of light, and the shadows passing over feathers and scales, visualize time that had remained within still forms. The objects placed in the image may seem to be stopped, but on their surfaces, traces of light and gaze accumulate in layers, and the objects are transformed into forms permeated by time without being clearly defined.

Within this process of the accumulation and transformation of time, objects move beyond simple material subjects. They undergo an ontological transition into “entities with value” onto which the artist’s imagination and beliefs are projected, and familiar objects are reborn as unfamiliar representations through dismantling and recombination.

Kim Hyeyoung, who has built “heterotopic” images that take real landscapes as motifs and rearrange them according to an order different from actual temporality, explores the structure of relationships through objects in this exhibition.

Her images appear to represent reality, yet specific place and time are suspended, while heterogeneous elements are juxtaposed to form another spatial layer. Here, painting functions beyond the simple representation of landscape as a field of thought where the order of reality is temporarily overturned or reconstructed.

The thirty-piece series ‘What One Has, What One Does Not Have’ begins from one large table. The table is a physical space on which objects are placed, as well as a social field where people face one another and form relationships. The objects placed on this space all appear outwardly to be “things one has,” but by intervening with latent narratives between them, the artist presents a state in which “having” and “not having” cannot be clearly distinguished.

Within the image, the two categories coexist in a single scene without excluding each other; some remain objects of desire that can never be reached, while others are presented as presences that briefly stay and then disappear. In this way, Kim Hyeyoung’s images reveal how objects remain, seep in, disappear, and form meaning, reminding us that the objects we encounter in everyday life are not simply subjects, but presences that contain layers of time.

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