A Pendulum swings from Affirmation to Interrogation
 
Gallery 021 presents its April exhibition under the title 《Affirmation & Interrogation》, bringing together works by three artists—Ko Sankeum, Yoo Bongsang, and Hong Sungchul. The works on view are grounded in the framework of painting, yet center on distinct materialities: iridescent artificial pearls, elastic threads, and solid nails. Each artist’s long-term engagement with a specific material has enabled their practice to traverse the boundaries of traditional painting, granting their works both openness and expansiveness. Furthermore, the maturity and refinement that emerge from a deep understanding and use of materiality captivate the viewer’s gaze and seduce the senses.
 
Pearls that swallow all text and its meanings, nails that pixelate and dismantle images, and threads that fragment images into striped forms reminiscent of television scan lines—each assumes a distinct role. Layered upon the rectangular canvas, these material elements erase, dismantle, and deconstruct both image and meaning. The heterogeneous nature of these materials, when combined with painting, simultaneously erases meaning and boundaries while also generating new meaning from the meaningless and constructing boundaries where none existed. The duality of the visual surface produced by these disparate materials extends beyond formal composition, penetrating the viewer’s perception and provoking both tension and intrigue in the interpretive process.
 
Within the realities they inhabit, the artists project onto their works the process of understanding their own identities through the repeated cycles of self-affirmation and self-interrogation. In this exhibition, each artist inscribes aspects of life and personal experience through their chosen material. These works, which embody the ceaseless oscillation between conviction and doubt as a form of visual metaphor, offer insight into both the artists’ sense of self and their questioning of the world they live in. Standing before these works—like a pendulum swinging between affirmation and interrogation—the viewer is led to project their own reality onto the artworks, confronting their own identity and their own certainties and doubts about the world.

References

• 《확신과 의문 (Affirmation & Interrogation)》