Installation view of 《The Naked Face rising out of the Marble》 © Laheen Gallery

The exhibition 《The Naked Face rising out of the Marble》 finds its curatorial point of departure in a line from a poem that speaks of “turning aside” — from certain systems, forms, or one’s own gaze — as the very means by which one builds something new and confronts the world anew each day. The inspiration comes from The Incomplete Is the Peak by the French modern poet Yves Bonnefoy. In particular, the line “destroy the naked face rising out of the marble” exhorts artists to dismantle and swallow their own inspirations, imaginations, and pursuits, only to construct something new upon the ruins.

In this spirit, the exhibition brings together three artists — Jungin Kim, Changkon Lim, and Sangkeun Ho — whose works take formation and dissolution as their structural principle. What they dismantle and reconstitute are fragments of memory, pictorial forms, or the alien moments latent within the everyday. By examining their practices, which stand slightly askew from the tendency to converge toward any singular point, the exhibition explores how these artists express an interest in the potential of disorder and in the emergence and generation of things that are minute or barely perceptible.

Jungin Kim visualizes fragments of experience and memory through the language of pixels (grids), creating misty, dispersed surfaces that disturb perception and delay comprehension. His unplanned brushstrokes, the act of smearing and blending subjects, and the viscous materiality of slowly layered oil paint collectively betray our expectations and obstruct instant understanding. The fundamental reason behind Kim’s deliberate disorientation lies in his desire to escape from the web of exclusionary and closed forces that pervade the world. At the same time, he reminds the viewer — within those gaps of confusion — of the need to reawaken the will to think and to create actively.


Installation view of 《The Naked Face rising out of the Marble》 © Laheen Gallery

Changkon Lim presents a non-visible sense of the body’s interior — the unseen phenomena within our corporeal being — through his series Crystals, sequoiadendron and Detached Body Fragments. Imagining blood and sap, rock and magma, viscera and the roots of ancient trees, the artist stirs these images into his paints, spreading materiality like the folds of skin. He pierces and hammers wood, layering paint through repeated gestures, until the wrinkles he excavates take on physical substance. These forms render the inner passageways of the body tactile, spatial, and visible, leading viewers to sense the interior as a material reality. Through this, Lim pursues a form of communication with the physical entities he brings into being.

Sangkeun Ho focuses on objects that have been lost, discarded, or buried beneath time — those neglected elements from unfamiliar realms — and contemplates what they emanate into the present. The objects that appear in his work, found stranded on streets, snow, water, or branches, persist in their immediacy without hardening into fixed meaning; they remain in flux, possessing the potential to suddenly transform or mutate into other contexts. Ho’s attachment to these subjects, coupled with his complex emotions toward them, fosters deep, personal resonance with each viewer. This arises from his deliberate exploration of everyday trajectories through conversations, collecting fragments of others’ experiences and perspectives. As a result, the air of strange worlds, the phenomena he observes, and the stories he hears from others all converge upon his canvas — not as a single linear interpretation, but as layered, multifaceted presences that unfold anew before us each time.

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