As the Marronnier Art Center of the Korea Culture & Arts Foundation was renamed ARKO Art Center, the institution presents its first exhibition under the new name: a Curatorial Invitational Exhibition spotlighting the artistic practices of Choi Gene Uk and Hong Kyoung Tack, opening on September 23, 2005. The Curatorial Invitational Exhibition was conceived in response to recent trends in the art world that have largely focused on solo and group exhibitions of young emerging artists. By contrast, this program seeks to re-engage the so-called “waist generation” of Korean art—mid-career artists who have been relatively marginalized—by reinvigorating their artistic momentum and reassessing the current position of Korean contemporary art.
 
Now in its second year, the exhibition aims to provide an opportunity to closely examine and illuminate changes in the artistic trajectories of established artists whose creative capacities have already been critically validated, while fostering a deeper understanding of various artistic genres connected to their work. Whereas last year’s Curatorial Invitational Exhibition explored transdisciplinary artistic tendencies that expanded artistic concepts through new media and the convergence of technology and art—traversing space and time—this year’s exhibition shifts its focus toward painting. Specifically, it examines how artists read and articulate the society in which we live through their own distinctive modes of thinking and visual perspectives within traditional media.
 
Accordingly, the exhibition invites Choi Gene Uk and Hong Kyoung Tack, artists who have consistently pursued painting grounded in the handcrafted, analog labor implied by the act of ‘painting,’ while proposing new possibilities for the medium. Through their work, the exhibition seeks to provide an occasion to identify further potential and contextual relevance within painting as a genre.


Choi Gene Uk, Love is Real, 2005 © Choi Gene Uk

Despite his prolific artistic activity, opportunities to view Choi Gene Uk’s solo exhibitions have been relatively rare in recent years. This exhibition therefore offers a valuable occasion to experience the evolution of his practice and his newly developed approaches to painterly composition. Rather than producing fixed, ‘formed images of the world,’ Choi Gene Uk adopts a range of artistic formal strategies in order to materialize an expanded concept of the ‘world,’ grounded in an overall, embodied awareness of being ‘within the world.’ His distinctive topographical explorations—employing tautological methods with shifts in viewpoint to transcend the limitations of human vision—extend not only within the canvas itself, but also to the manner in which the canvas frame is installed.
 
As a result, Choi Gene Uk’s work embodies a process in which the subject’s gaze toward the object becomes enveloped by the object’s reciprocal gaze toward the subject. In this way, the artist’s sensations and experiential processes in encountering the world are concretized and conveyed directly to the viewer. The exhibition presents paintings that translate responses to the real world into painterly language, alongside ‘text works’ produced by the artist through directly typing on a computer keyboard and engaging with letters as they appear on the monitor, as well as previously unexhibited works.

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