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Hada Contemporary Summer Show 2011

News of an upcoming group exhibition featuring five young Korean artists: Hada Contemporary downstairs at Albermarle Gallery. Meanwhile upstairs at the Albemarle is their annual Summer Collective which includes Korean artists and Albemarle regulars Kim Yeon and Lee Jaehyo.

Hada Contemporary Summer Show 2011
Kim Hyuenjun | Lee Horyon | Park Jihye | Yoon Byungwoon | Yun Weedong
29 July – 3 September 2011

The new annual exhibition series by Hada Contemporary, presents five young Korean artists in a conjoint context. Using painting and sculpture, these artists all work with the conscious manipulation of gaze. Whether our gaze is made to feel voyeuristic, or made conscious through theatricality and surrealism, these works make the observer conscious of their status as viewer and consequently as a participant with a work of art.

Lee Horyon: Overlapping Image 110107L (2011)
Lee Horyon: Overlapping Image 110107L (2011). Oil on linen, 91 x 116.8 cm

Lee Horyon uses overlapping and interlocking images to weave desire into his oil paintings. Always maintaining a fixed distance from the model, Lee’s work separates the vague relationship between image and desire. Though the subject itself is revealing and seducing, the intimately intertwined images weave the viewpoint and gaze in such a way that the work becomes less an open seduction and more a psychological game of voyeurism and ways of looking.

Park Jihye: Gesture 0802 (2008)
Park Jihye: Gesture 0802 (2008). Oil on canvas, 162 x 97 cm

Park Jihye is a meticulous painter who concerns herself primarily with depictions of women. These women are often caught from behind, mid-movement. The lifelike qualities of her paintings interfere with a moment in time and she is able, through the interactions of movement, to engage the viewer into a time sequence. Without tension or preoccupation, her characters become familiar to the viewer and her paintings deny passive observation and encourage total absorption within the moment.

Kim Hyuenjun: Fragile (2010)
Kim Hyuenjun: Fragile (2010). Urethane coat on recycled cardboard. 110x120x80cm

Kim Hyuenjun’s works centre on value creation within art and society. His sculptures grant immediate worth to utilitarian materials. Dotted with bar codes, address labels and trademarks, Jun brings this protective cardboard into being: A chair, a shoe, and at times the priceless, a household pet such as a dog, begins to takes shape. These surreal objects and beings come to embody the confusion and conflict of a modern consumerist society.

Yoon Byung-woon: Soundless (2010)
Yoon Byung-woon: Soundless (2010). Acrylic on canvas, 130 x 162cm

Yoon Byungwoon meticulously depicts dreamlike compositions, which play with ideas of space and the viewer’s removal from depicted scenes. Surreal, yet carefully staged and in a precise landscape that is as much vast as it is exact, his works retain a quiet drama. This drama is further punctuated by the painting of theatre curtains in certain works, which draw a distinct line between the real and the unreal, confirming to the viewer that they are witnessing a staged set. Self-conscious and intriguing, Byungwoon Yoon allows us to glimpse his secret world without ever fully revealing its intent.

Yun Weedong: Contrast 33 (2010)
Yun Weedong: Contrast 33 (2010). Acrylic, water colour on paper, 180 x 140 cm

Yun Weedong masterfully utilizes watercolours to create hyperrealist images of human figures. Though the characters initially appear to be beautiful, upon closer inspection their flaws are uncovered – dirty fingernails, body hair, veins and wrinkles – and the paintings take on remarkable emotion with each imperfection. Often painted against a dark background, his figures fade in and out of the darkness, as if drifting precariously through life and death with ashen skin. Deeply psychological, these paintings play on our religious understandings of life, death and afterlife.

Hada Contemporary at Albemarle Gallery
49 Albemarle Street
London W1S 4JR
Open Weekdays 10am-6pm; Sat 10am-4pm

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