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Jin Kim and Dae Hun Kwon in Arcadia, at I-MYU

23 November — 12 January
Victoria Hall | Jin Kim | Dae Hun Kwon
Opening Reception 22 November 6-8pm
Tuesday-Saturday 10-6pm or by appointment

I-MYU Projects is pleased to present the second exhibition of emerging Korean artists at its permanent gallery space in London. Artists Jin Kim and Dae Hun Kwon will be joined by UK artist Victoria Hall in an exhibition that looks to the margins of the classical and the contemporary landscape.

Titled Arcadia the works inform a continued historical reinvention of the term Arcadia by artists, writers, and musicians drawn towards the past. Specifically relating to the landscape the term Arcadia has remained, through history, one step removed from civilization, originating in Greek mythology as the birthplace of the God Pan, also known as the Shepherd God. The Roman poet Virgil established the geography of Arcadia, identifying it as an area of the Peloponnesian coast, a pastoral and remote landscape. Virgil adopted Arcadia in his famed ‘Eclogues’ as a means to counterbalance ideas of beauty and idyll against those of social and moral corruption and from here Arcadia came to represent utopian aspirations. It later informed the classical landscape painters of the 17th century, as artists such as Poussin and Lorrain began to invest in the landscape with regard that had previously only been reserved for the vestige of epic history paintings.

The artists in Arcadia draw on the divergent nature of modern lifestyle, informed by discrepancies between the past and the present they offer considerations of the landscape exploring ideas of classicism, mythology, fracture and perception.

Dae Hun Kwon: The wind through the treeDae Hun Kwon offers half glimpses of objects, of landscapes and woodlands. Natural forms emerge through rotating panels for fleeting moments as mechanical holographs, created through shadows cast by the diverse range of mass manufactured materials that the artist uses, from nails and wood to polystyrene. Kwon’s work explores the psychology of illusion, of optical encounter and decipherable structure, as the mind through the eye attempts to locate and decode, shape, colour and form.

Jin Kim: UntitledJin Kim presents a series of new paintings that explore the threshold that exists between interior and exterior spaces. As landscapes laid dense with mark and physical matter the works investigate the margins between artist and environment. Objects arranged within interior spaces inform a commentary of modern living provoking an intensity of experience that is set against occasional glimpses of, removed, vivid, and open landscape.

Victoria Hall: Raphael before ReynoldsVictoria Hall recasts through the medium of photography historical paintings from Masters such as Gainsborough, Raphael and Reynolds. The works, all produced between the 16th and the start of the 20th Century, the latter date marking the point at which photography began to gain widespread use, Hall transcribes the often-idealised social and romantic associations of these paintings. Informed by gender and gentry, a politics of the landscape and land ownership, Hall’s photographs do not just recast these works through modern technology, but also through contemporary considerations of re-enactment, period, costume and drama. Hall reminds us that the reading of past works, socially and politically, is inextricably linked to the social structures of the here-and-now.

Hall’s work along with that of Dae Hun Kwon and Jin Kim reconfigures the shifting platform of Arcadia, touching as it does on the constantly evolving relationship between figure and landscape, between the perceived and the imagined, between the ideal and the actual.

I-MYU Projects are based at 23 Charlotte Road, London, EC2A 3PB

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(automatically generated) Read LKL’s review of this event here.

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