HADA Contemporary is pleased to announce the first UK solo exhibition of Min Jungyeon. This exhibition showcases Min’s most recent paintings and drawings of her phantasmagorical realm.
Min Jungyeon explores the grandeur of the universe and the existence of human beings within by creating an unpredictable universe of her own. Min creates unfamiliar clusters of forms suspended in air, which seem to grow into a new hybrid space between reality and fantasy. Intestines and villus like elongated forms diffusing and melting into architectural and unidentifiable somnolent backgrounds are often used to symbolise her flowing idea that spreads like liquid through all of her paintings analogous to a virus. Although the eccentric biomorphic forms of images display strong affinity to surrealist’s paintings from the juxtaposition of incongruent imageries in one space, her interest lays in the oscillation between the thin boundary between reality and illusion challenging our perception through creation of dream like nonexistent world, as Hieronymus Bosch ventured through his uncompromising creative imagination on the canvas.
The main characteristic of Min’s works is well-balanced undulation of dichotamic values such as abstraction-realism, inside-outside, two dimension- three dimension, reality-fiction, microscopic-macroscopic, rational-irrational, East-West among others that aids her to flourish ideas without limits. For example, the artist endeavours to reconcile the rational – what can be read and can be seen, where one can recognise what it is, be this a landscape, a person, the architecture where the perspective is – and the irrational – may come in the form of energy around us; it may be invisible, yet it exists. As her abstract compositions with hyperrealistic figures depicts real yet unreal world of her imagination suggests the odd sensation of drifting to and fro both ends of the world. Portraying the artist’s continuous conflict and resolution between two identities as a Korean-born Parisian.
Min Jungyeon (b. 1979) received MFA in Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris and BFA at Hongik University, Seoul. She exhibited extensively internationally at Musée d’Art Moderne de Saint-Etienne Métropole, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Art, Kashya Hildebrand, Galerie Maria Lund, Berlin-Fiedrichshain among others. She has been awarded with Prix des Partenaires du musée d’Art Moderne de Saint-Etienne Métropole, Saint-Etienne, France (2011), first prize for Concours Centre Culturel pour Jeunes artistes Coréens, Paris, France (2004) and third prize in German-Korean Artistic Relations Competition, Seoul, Korea (1999)
