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HADA Contemporary Group exhibition: Kim Hyunjun, Kim Younghun and Han Jisoc

HADA Contemporary’s second show of the new year is a group exhibition featuring Kim Hyunjun, Kim Younghun and Han Jisoc, which runs 7 February – 3 March:

HADA Contemporary is pleased to present works by three Korean artists – Kim Hyunjun, Kim Younghun and Han Jisoc – of the bittersweet nostalgic visual narration on their imaginative reinterpretation and critique on our lives within the contemporary culture and society.

Kim Hyunjun: Side Tray (2012)
Kim Hyunjun: Side Tray (2012). Cardboard, 85 x 150 x 70cm

Kim Hyunjun’s artistic practice focuses on the correlation between material, human and society. His immaterial packaging sculptures embody the confusion and the conflict of the modern consumerist society and question the value creation within art and society. By transforming the distributional utilitarian and peripheral object – packaging – into an actual object of itself, an artwork, and another insignificant valueless object, he purposefully mocks the social system that we engulf and entrap ourselves. The artist intervenes with the preconceived cognitive sign system and transposes what is considered to be invaluable to valueless. Furthermore, by allowing the viewers to witness its imperfection and dysfunctionality as an object of depiction upon close inspection, he derides on the process and the idea of value creation. Everything is merely an integument of an integument, an illusion of a disillusion. What remains of his objects is in fact the key components in his works – the ephemeral contemporary lives and their minute traces left behind with the packaging where diverse narratives unfold. These images and objects are the fragmented traces that lead us to recollect and introspect past, life, memory and origin, like a black and white old photograph that pushes us far back to beyond.

Kim Younghun: Electric Cloud p-1104 (2011)
Kim Younghun: Electric Cloud p-1104 (2011). Oil on canvas, 130.5 x 162 cm

Kim Younghun’s artistic language speaks the nostalgia and the anxiety of civilisation from the uncertainty and discontinuity of life, the fear of technology and the loss of humanity through his painterly surfaces. The complex entanglement of his personal experience of reality and virtual reality becomes personified on the surface through the reconstruction of images from both worlds. Deriving from his journalist background during the transitional period from analogue to digital, his paintings question the media and the technology and how it affected contemporary culture and lives. Organically amalgamating with exuberant colours of psychological wavelength inspired from brain and electronic waves, dissembled body parts suspended in the air and rainbow like clouds delineate current manipulative and destructive social media and the world. Spontaneous at times and constructional simultaneously, he crosses the boundary between abstraction and figuration and reality and fiction. “I depict detached and fragmented bodies to show the aging body of our evanescent mortal lives amongst existential uncertainty and obsolescence of memory.”

Han Jisoc: Untitled 100923-329001 (2010)
Han Jisoc: Untitled 100923-329001 (2010). Oil on linen, 130 x 162 cm

Han Jisoc’s thinly applied layers of abstract paintings are the depiction of his innermost thoughts fabricated from the continuous sedimentation of diverse social incidents and relationships collected from the media such as newspaper. Driven by the sense of isolation and detachment, the artists erect his own imaginary world that he can reside and be consoled through these abundant narratives recorded in his subconscious. Before long, this fantasy becomes his identity and he metamorphoses it onto the canvas through various layers of floating abstraction. Wittgenstein once mentioned the impossibility in grasping the essence nonetheless of our endeavour to depict the world through utmost worldly knowledge and information through language. Similarly, Han believes that the figurative representation prevents one from approaching to the essence. He splashes, drags and drips, catching the spontaneous image that arises from the canvas, whilst, various narratives come, go and transform. His unconsciously painted layers of abstractions come to being on the eyes of the beholders indexically cueing from their own experiences, memories and images. The abstractions before your eyes are the stories of your life. The infinite interpretability is the world we live in and opening up this possibility is his way to connect back with it.

Kim Hyunjun (b. 1978) received MFA and BFA at Dongguk University, Seoul, Korea. He has exhibited widely in UK and Korea such as Saatchi Gallery London, Kumho Museum Seoul, Seoul Museum of Art, Gyeonggi Museum of Art, Insa Art Center among others. He has been awarded with 29th Joongang Fine Arts Prize.

Kim Younghun (b. 1964) received MFA at Chelsea College of Arts and Design, London a diploma at Goldsmith, London and BFA at Hongik University, Seoul. He has exhibited internationally such as Sungkok Art Museum Seoul, Cité Internationale des Arts Gallery Paris, 271 Höherweg Studio, Düsseldorf, Ingolstadt City Gallery, Ingolstadt, Gwangju Museum of Art, Grande Halle de La Villette Paris among others.

Han Jisoc (b.1971) received MFA at Chelsea College of Art and Design, London and BFA at Hongik University, Seoul. He exhibited widely in Korea and UK such as Tate Britain London, Cite Internationale des Arts Paris, Seoul Museum of Art, Hangaram Art Museum, Busan Cultural Centre, Kunstraum T27 Berlin among others.

HADA CONTEMPORARY
21 VYNER STREET
LONDON
E2 9DG
+44 (0)20 8983 7700
+44 (0)7912 417629
Email. [email protected]

OPENING HOURS
Wednesday – Friday : 11am to 6pm
Saturday – Sunday: 11am to 4pm
or by appointment

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