Sikyung Sung’s solo exhibition 《Exit Exit》 is held from November 8 to 28 at SHIFT / Art Space HYEONG.

In an interview with Martin Gayford, David Hockney once reflected on the dominance of abstract painting in the late 1950s and the semi-abstract tendencies of Francis Bacon, recalling a question that defined that era: “How do you push abstraction further?” Considering the historical context—Jackson Pollock’s death, the emergence of Frank Stella, and the impending decline of American modernism and the myth of flatness—this was a timely and pressing inquiry. Yet Hockney, with the certainty of hindsight, asserts that abstraction can no longer move forward.¹ While this may be a rhetorical gesture typical of postmodern painting, it cannot be universally applied to all contemporary abstraction. Still, for today’s abstract painters exploring painting’s critical potential, the empty canvas—devoid of qualitative criteria or gravitational discourse—may resemble what Borges once described as “a desert as the most perfect labyrinth.”² If so, how do today’s young abstract painters, standing in the center of this vast labyrinth with no crossroads or signs, find their way to an exit?

Sikyung Sung approaches the canvas with acute awareness of its rectangular frame and the interdependent relationship it has with the internal composition—treating this relationship as a foundational condition of painting.³ Through the process of painting, he divides the canvas into arbitrary zones using masking tape, drawing out initial forms or compositional cues from these boundaries and then gradually expanding or establishing spatial relationships between segments, creating multidirectional disjunctions. Finding such cues entails capturing fleeting fragments of sensory thought within the fractured autonomy of partitioned space through brushwork. The resulting forms—due to the imposed framing—become inherently low-resolution painting-images. This condition allows unconscious references to art-historical conventions and painterly tropes to surface, and Sung responds to these visual citations by shaping the nature of his spatial disjunctions through dialogue with the inherited image.

This methodology also serves to put quotation marks around the reductive effect created when compositional flow—attempting to break outward—is reabsorbed by the canvas’s fixed boundary. The interaction between this outward urge and its containment within recalls the architectural logic of a labyrinth.⁴ The brushstrokes, trapped within this “quasi-labyrinth” framed in quotation, lose their kinetic energy and become static images. The velocity embedded in these marks either transforms into a dynamic force that cuts through temporal layers or sinks into the undercurrent of accumulated time. In this way, Sung’s brushwork and imagery often form subtle temporal gaps, overlapping with mechanisms of reflection that arise when the movement of the brush diverges from or aligns with the trajectory of thought.

By establishing foundational rules that continually reawaken the conditions of painting, and by meditating within the limitations of these rules, Sung charts a path through the abstract maze that all painters must repeatedly retreat from and re-enter. 《Exit Exit》, his debut solo exhibition, occupies two gallery spaces positioned in an L-shaped configuration on the same floor, but it does not offer two divergent exits. At SHIFT, Sung presents a selection of works developed through a consistent process since 2016. Meanwhile, at Art Space HYEONG, he exhibits experimental variations that deviate from his primary methodology. Through this bifurcated presentation, the exhibition hopes to link the specificity of the artist’s rule-based system with the broader perceptual experience of the audience.


— Curated by Jungwoo Park



1) Martin Gayford, A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney, trans. Eunjeong Joo, Seoul: Design House, 2012, p. 44
2) Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph, trans. Byeongha Hwang, Seoul: Minumsa, 1998, pp. 188–189
3) See artist’s notes
4) Minsung Kang, “Architectural Play: Maze, Cladding, Tectonics,” (MA Thesis, Kyonggi University), 2002, p. 10

References

• SHIFT / Art Space HYEONG