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Ways of Seeing at I-MYU

I-MYU’s 2010 exhibition season starts with a two-parter curated by Gunwoo Shin, who is also one of the participating artists.

Ways of Seeing

Part I: Opening reception : 7th January 2010 6-8pm 7 – 27 January 2010
Heena Kim | Jihye Park | Jung-Ouk Hong | Soonhak Kwon | Tina Hage

Part II: Opening reception : 29th January 2010 6-8pm 29 January – 20 February 2010
Andreas Blank | Ayoung Kim | Gunwoo Shin | Sangyoon Yoon | Janne Malmros

Tuesday – Saturday 12-6pm or by appointment

The sense of sight that we experience is influenced on what we know and believe. We generally see things in a boundary of our sight and understanding. The term, ‘image’ (taken from John Berger’s essay ‘the way of seeing’) indicates something newly made or reproduced sight; and the artists are people who create images. All the images that artists produce embody ways of seeing. Their works provide direct evidence about the world where contemporary people exist rather than any other types of media in the world.

HEENA KIM | Dear M. C. Escher | Acrylic and collage on canvas | 122x122cm | 2009

The main theme that links these artists is that they have been making works in their own counties, from Germany, Denmark and Korea. The artists’ initial steps outside their lands are London; but no one knows what made them to reach here. They are unhinging their own histories in London where it seems more dynamic than any other cities. London is a flourishing splendor of individuals and a centre of cosmopolis. In this enormous city, these artists perceive and act upon their own ways of seeing.

Heena Kim stimulates her imagination and makes characters which are part human, part creature in her painting. Dismantling the human body and joining it with parts of non-humans such as insects and animals, she tries to tangle the lines of fragility which defines the anatomy of fantasy. Jihye Park is interested in the fantastical, the horrific and the paradoxical elements of the Fairy Tale. Combining these ingredients in a simple recipe she has made her own Fairy Tale. Her Fairy Tale focuses upon conventions of sense and the sensibility of relationships. Jung-Ouk Hong tries to express harmonies which consist of emotional qualities by using common parts of everyday life and the inherent rational values. In his works, there are three basic components: triangles, circles and squares. They compose all visual formations in the world. His works aim to enhance psychological and physical elements assembling those basic components. Soonhak Kwon finds the scenery around everyday routine as an uncanny object is a means of reaching the real, a region of sacredness, in the sense that it is impossible to reach as Jacques Lacan emphasizes. Accordingly, it is possible to taste the heaven on earth if we truly speculate in the belief of paradox, since heaven is above us but ‘Here and Now’. Tina Hage is interested in the relationship between the crowd and the individual and how they are represented in the mass media. She deploys contemporary photojournalistic and topical imagery from multi media, which Tina reflects upon by using herself repetitively to re-enact the found scenes.

SANGYOON YOON | Protem | Oil on canvas | 200x160cm | 2009
SANGYOON YOON | Protem | Oil on canvas | 200x160cm | 2009

Andreas Blank’s works are about finding or reconstructing poetical images from contemporary life. They are carved from stone with a combination of different seldom stones picked up or transported from quarries/ mountains all over the world. The work is about creating a new order or developing new systems of order and organization. Ayoung Kim restages the crime with the cool logic of the detective and the gruesome fascination of the voyeur. Her cutting and pasting takes place in three dimensional space, yielding impossible spaces for the eye to penetrate. In the process of montage some of the original meaning of the images is lost, and other meanings accrue. Gunwoo Shin’s work portrays mental landscapes on the crossroad between the conscious and the unconscious, through relief style painting. He freely moves beyond the lines of reality and the world of the surreal, giving diverse artistic imaginations to realistic subject matter. Sangyoon Yoon’s works are initiated from nomadic life of globalised society. He employs unusual elements and fabricates them in his paintings which make audiences feel and understand ‘uncommon’ in the fictive circumstance. Janne Malmros uses assemblage and adaptation, combined with drawing, screen-printing and elements of photographic processes to create playful, subtle and quasi-alchemical work through a subtle awareness of materials, form and the varying poetic weights of different objects. She is interested in disappearance through appearance, repetition, perception, mimicry and transformation especially in relation to found and constructed patterns and shapes.

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