Installation view of 《MIMESIS AP 4: MINGLE》 © Mimesis Art Museum

Mimesis Art Museum(Director: Hong Jiwoong) presents 《MIMESIS AP 4: MINGLE》, the fourth project of MIMESIS AP. This exhibition introduces Kim Yunseob, Park Seok Min, and You Hyeonkyeong, artists who express objects, people, or landscapes from various times and spaces that confront the gaze of “the one who sees.”

In their works, subjects overwhelmed by a fleeting situation and by the artist’s gaze gather together on a single picture plane. These elements are implied and revealed through various modes of painting, together with the concept of “MINGLE,” the exhibition’s subtitle. Kim Yunseob’s work begins from the contrast between the smooth surface of the digital and the rough surface of the canvas, researching the orthodoxy of painting.

Park Seok Min’s artistic world connects what is physically and conceptually vast with what is trivial, what is distant with what is near, through a complex gaze. You Hyeonkyeong’s works are expressed as landscapes where the artist’s intention to represent what is seen in the very brief moment before the brush touches the canvas collides and mingles with her inner state, which changes over time.

Their paintings may be understood in entirely different ways, but ultimately they can be seen as a sequence of picture planes in which time and space mixed with emotion and gaze are revealed. MIMESIS AP is an artist project by Mimesis Art Museum that selects and introduces artists who build provocative bodies of work while reflecting on the social role of the artist.


Kim Yunseob: pandemonium

Kim Yunseob approaches his work with an emphasis on how contemporary artists interpret painting within art history. As he began his practice, the artist thought of “painting” as the opposite point to contemporary art’s expansion into various media. He saw painters as magicians or illusionists, and regarded the most primal power of painting as “illusion.”

His background in animation stimulated his desire to research painting, drawing, and image, and he has presented his work through project-based exhibitions while researching painting. In the 2016 exhibition 《Pilgrim-Martyr, This World Is Too Old for There to Be Anything New》, the artist called contemporary painters pilgrims and chose Vincent van Gogh as a symbolic figure.

He thought of Van Gogh as the savior and martyr of painting, and as a “zombie,” a being who is still not dead but consumed in contemporary society. He expressed this reinterpretation through flat drawings and paintings. Kim Yunseob has also named contemporary young painters who work with paint “post-artisans,” and has planned various projects with fellow artists.

The 2017 exhibition 《People Call This Kind of Thing a Novel》 appears to have shifted from an inquiry into the illusionism of painting toward an experiment with the formal aspects of painting. The project was organized so that a short story seemed to unfold each time one entered a room of the exhibition space, and the titles of each artist were presented in the form of a short story collection.

This was a solution that emerged from the idea that, as a painter, he wanted language, art, and the images of their lives to appear like fiction while contemplating his identity. 《ARTISTS OF TOMORROW》, held in the same year, was also concerned with images: how humans perceive images and how painting responds to them.

It suggests that painting becomes an object, that is, a thing-cloth, is placed again with objects, and is then immediately exhibited again as image. Since then, through 2020, the artist has held 14 solo exhibitions and continued his own attitude of endlessly exploring painting while looking back on his past work.

This extends from his first solo exhibition 《Pandemonium, Near Defense》 to his recent project 《Geunbang Station_Today’s Contemporary Art》. These works have studied the differences between line and plane, and the differences in authority between drawing and painting. These experiments can be understood as the artist’s attempt to develop a new worldview by bringing such differences into collision and accepting them.

Installation view of 《MIMESIS AP 4: MINGLE》 © Mimesis Art Museum

Park Seok Min: TEMPORARY ORBIT

Park Seok Min’s works sometimes appear as detailed objects, people, and spaces, and at other times as abstract picture planes in which everything is mixed together. This exhibition presents the full scope of his practice, from early works to recent works, including previously undisclosed pieces. Through this, the exhibition offers an opportunity to consider why spatiality and temporality are felt simultaneously in his works, which are marked by flatness, and how the things painted on canvas appear mixed together.

In his works, time, space, language, and atmosphere—conditions and residues of the world—are intertwined and revealed as they are. They are total yet partial, one world yet a personal space. Park Seok Min’s works express a state or situation in which subtle emotional agitation arises, when one faces a certain circumstance and cannot express the state at that moment in precise language.

Yet they do not stop there. They simultaneously express the viewpoint that assumes the artist is observing the entire situation he encountered from a distant perspective. What he seeks to express here is an isolated, incommunicable sensation captured by his own gaze, as well as the relationality generated at the point of contact with the world in which that sensation was felt.

From 2013 to the early 2020s, Park Seok Min worked on the ‘Temporary Orbit’ series. Temporary Orbit combines the word “temporary,” evoking adjectives such as provisional, variable, and momentary, with “orbit,” taken from meanings such as trajectory, repetition, and trace. Over the roughly ten years of his practice, the artist’s approach to this concept has also varied slightly according to period.

In his early work, he painted everyday spaces as parts of outer space. Around 2016-2017, he sought to implicitly contain in painting the atmosphere created by individual voices and actions within political situations. Since 2018, he has carried out formal experiments based on doubt and curiosity toward the time-space of the “present,” focusing in that process on an inquiry into discovering the complete form of wholly incomplete stimuli.

Park Seok Min continues to experiment with generating an entirely different time and space when the unclear boundary between the two concepts of sensation and linguistic thought is realized as an individual phenomenon: the painterly picture plane.


You Hyeonkyeong: Fine

You Hyeonkyeong’s works are expressed as landscapes where the artist’s intention to represent what is visible within the extremely short time before the brush touches the canvas collides and mingles with her inner state, which changes over time. Her work The Forbidden City(2019) measures 312 centimeters high and 476 centimeters wide.

Within this large-scale work, the impression of the Forbidden City, rather than its form, is painted with broad brush marks. In relation to this, the artist speaks of “fire.” She explains that when she looks at a bright, hot, and splendid fire burning fiercely before her eyes, she becomes absorbed in looking and temporarily forgets complicated thoughts, feeling at ease.

She says that she painted the work by recalling good memories of traveling to the Forbidden City, memories of climbing to a high place and looking down, and the warm wind. She also says that the other two paintings with the same title were the last paintings she made before leaving Seorak, and were painted with the added memory of the fire she had seen throughout the winter.

She did not paint the Forbidden City by looking at it, but by remembering it and adding her own sensation. It is less a landscape than You Hyeonkyeong herself. Most of the works presented in this exhibition are the result of her time living and working in Seorak. From June to December 2019, the artist had an opportunity to use a space in Seorak as both living space and studio, and she seeped into Green Space.

Her work, sometimes described as expressionist or abstract expressionist, is best known for portraits marked by intense primary colors and rough brushstrokes. In the exhibition held before she went to Seorak, many of these portrait works were presented under the title I Am Not in a Good Mood.

Working across Seoul, Paju, New York, London, Switzerland, Argentina, Germany, and other places, You Hyeonkyeong presents previously undisclosed new works in this exhibition, including Childhood Is a Blessing, Standing in the Field, The Forbidden City 1, 2, 3, This Is Love, Silence, A Person Who Is Sad to Have a Body, and Fine. The keyword of this exhibition is Fine, and the works appear as landscapes rather than figure-centered paintings.

You Hyeonkyeong usually chooses to paint figures from direct observation, but in Seorak she worked while spending time alone, organizing and remembering the time that had passed.

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