Soomin Shon, In God We Trust, 2023, HD video, sound, 12’ 9”” ©Seoul Museum of Art
From July 6 to July 30, SeMA Warehouse, an annex of the Seoul Museum of Art, presents If reality is the best metaphor, a solo exhibition by Soomin Shon (b.1986), and Swaying Straight Line, a solo exhibition by Sejin Hong (b. 1992).
Soomin Shon pays attention to how boundaries and cracks in our technology-based capitalist society affect our individual identities, perceptions, and relationships with others. Against this backdrop, the artist visualizes our experience of desire, emptiness, and loneliness through time-based medium. If reality is the best metaphor is an extension of this interest, focusing on the ambivalence of values that drive individuals and societies, such as money, but which have become absolute power over them.
Sejin Hong, Spinning lines, 2023, Oil on Canvas, 45x45cm ©Seoul Museum of Art
Using painting as her primary medium, Sejin Hong’s work focuses on the information gap between the real world and her own senses. In particular, she has been thinking about the gap between visual and auditory information about the phenomena in front of her as she listens to sounds through cochlear implants due to hearing loss as a child. In this exhibition, the artist explores the realm of truth that exists between the new and the old in the age of technology through 16 works. The exhibition features paintings depicting landscapes with natural organisms and artificial mechanical objects used in factories on the same screen. The landscapes are often transformed into geometric shapes, and the surface of a painting is constructed by scratching or covering. Also, artificially reconstructed sounds of birdsong and a work in the form of a praxinoscope add to the diversity of the exhibition.
These two exhibitions, which are part of the Seoul Museum of Art’s ‘2023 Emerging Artists Supporting Program’, showcase the perspectives of emerging artists with a sense of the contemporary world.
