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Exhibition news: Kyung Hwa Shon in UK/RAINE, at Saatchi Gallery

London-based artist Kyung Hwa Shon has been shortlisted in the Painting category of the open competition UK/raine. Her work can be found in gallery 3 on the ground floor of the Saatchi Gallery.

UK/RAINE

AN OPEN COMPETITION FOR EMERGING ARTISTS FROM THE UK AND UKRAINE
Exhibition: 24 November 2015 – 3 January 2016
Saatchi Gallery | Duke of York’s HQ | King’s Road | London SW3 4RY | www.saatchigallery.com
10am-6pm, 7 days a week, last entry 5:30pm
Admission free.

UK/RAINE flyer

UK/raine: Emerging Artists from the UK and Ukraine continues the collaboration between the Firtash Foundation and Saatchi Gallery as part of Days of Ukraine in the UK and follows on from the huge success of Premonition: Ukrainian Art Now, which ran at the Saatchi Gallery from 9th October – 3rd November 2014.

Premonition was the largest survey to date of contemporary Ukrainian art in the UK and showcased over 80 works by 38 artists. The show attracted 137,438 visitors (5,494 per day), making it the only UK exhibition in the world’s top 20 most attended shows in 2014, and the seventh most popular contemporary art exhibition worldwide according to The Art Newspaper’s annual survey of international museum attendance.

Premonition also formed part of the annual Days of Ukraine in the UK festival and the Firtash Foundation’s ongoing support and promotion of Ukrainian arts and culture.
UK/raine is the first ever open competition for all emerging artists from the UK and Ukraine who are between the ages of 18-35. Worth GB£75,000 in prize money, the aim of the competition is to find and support the most imaginative and talented young artists, including students on BA and MA courses who live and work in the UK or Ukraine, or born in either country.

Artists entered their work via the Saatchi Gallery’s website into one of five categories: installation, new media (including video and photography), painting, sculpture and street art.

A shortlist of 30 artists (six from each category) are exhibiting their work over one entire floor at the Saatchi Gallery in an exhibition running from 24th November 2015 – 3rd January 2016. A winner from each of the categories, as well as an overall winner were selected by a renowned panel of international judges including: Johnson Chang – Co-founder Asia Art Archive, curator and Guest Professor of China Academy of Art (Hangzhou, China) and founder of Hanart TZ Gallery (Hong Kong), Nigel Hurst – Saatchi Gallery CEO, Prof. Dr. Apinan Poshyananda, Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Culture, Thailand and Oleksandr Soloviov – Ukrainian author and curator. There was also a winner of a separate public vote. All winners were announced at the exhibition’s launch and VIP private view in London on 23rd November 2015.

Each of the category winners received GB£10,000 with the overall winner of the prize receiving a further GB£20,000. The winner of the public vote received GB£5,000 of production costs towards their work, project or exhibition in order to support their future artistic endeavours.

Kyung Hwa Shon

Kyung Hwa Shon with her work The City of Fragments
Kyung Hwa Shon with her work The City of Fragments

My artwork explores the reciprocal relation between a city and the imagination through the eyes of a city phantom, ‘Stillman’. The uncovered invisible remnants of ‘Stillman’ make the city a field of excavation where everything is buried, hidden, and remaining undiscovered. Through chasing his traces, the city is transformed into a surrealistic theatrical space for exploration of the feeling of newness and psychic ambivalence. A number of unanticipated experiences in everyday life unfold into extensions of imagination that oscillate between virtuality and actuality. The imagination heightens the sense of unpredictability, instantaneity, and disorientation in the city. It opens out a space for the possibility of experiencing a rapid transition of both spatiality and temporality, as well as sensory experiences of fragmentation.

The myriad ambiguous signs and letters in the street and fragmented specular images on shop-window displays are crucial elements in creating peculiar relationships with the world of things, implying the emergence of the imagination. Through these elements, the infinite boundary of the imagination unleashes the city as unaccustomed, disoriented, and reencountered. My art-practice focuses on the rediscovery of psychological heteromorphic identification, the presence of invisible substance, and fantastic visual experiences emanating from serendipitous moments of glitch in the city.

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