Installation view of 《A Serbian Mountain, a Quarry, Venčac》 (Art Space Hyeong, 2020) © Kayoung Choi

The exhibition 《A Serbian Mountain, a Quarry, Venčac》(Art Space Hyeong, 2020) will be held at the exhibition space “Art Space Hyeong.”

In this exhibition, artist Kayoung Choi, who has continued to work under the theme of “beauty close to reality,” presents recent works depicting new images of landscape by referring to photographs of the natural scenery of southeastern Europe’s Serbia—around Mount Venčac—taken and sent by a friend, as well as internet materials.

Choi confesses that when she painted Mount Venčac, a place she had never visited, she initially understood the subject as “pure nature” untouched by human hands, but when she discovered traces of a quarry in the cliff section of the landscape, she felt a kind of reversal, a sense of betrayal.

While the work A Serbian Mountain-from Marija Curk omits the quarry area from the photographic image of Mount Venčac, the works A Mountain, a Quarry-from Marija Curk and White Marble of Venčac-from Vukasin Stancevic bring the image of the quarry to the forefront. These are all responses by the artist to the earlier discovery.

The exhibition title, composed of three listed words, reflects the artist’s perception of the subject moving toward what lies behind it. Through her work, Choi proposes a space to reconsider the image of nature as she first understood it, and further to reflect on the existing methods of painting and their meanings.

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