2022 Kumho Young Artist Part 1: Solo Exhibitions by Choi Gayoung, Park Dasom, and Heo Ujung
[Asia Economy Reporter Kim Heeyoon] “In 1984, before I was born, I happened to collect a postcard written by a foreigner who worked at Bugok Hawaii in Changnyeong, South Korea, on an overseas secondhand sales site. Through the content of the postcard, I focused on the now-defunct theme park and the people who worked to create its exotic and fantastic image.”
Bugok Hawaii, which opened in 1979, was the first comprehensive leisure facility in Korea, established by the late Bae Jongseong, a Korean resident in Japan from Dochon-myeon, Changnyeong-gun. Equipped with a first-class tourist hotel, hot spring facilities, amusement park, indoor and outdoor swimming pools, wave pool, sculpture park, wetland botanical garden, and a large performance hall, it gained fame as a honeymoon and family travel destination in the 1980s and 1990s when overseas travel was not common. However, with the opening of large water parks nearby in the 2010s, it closed in 2017 after operating at a loss.
Artist Choi Gayoung began by collecting a postcard sent in 1984 by a foreign dancer named J to her hometown in the UK, before Choi was born. She then interviewed people who had experienced and remembered Bugok Hawaii at that time, transferring what she had not and could not experience onto the canvas.
The front of the postcard Choi collected was filled with images of tropical plants cultivated at Bugok Hawaii, embodying the “Hawaii of Korea.” Choi said, “Through my work, I wanted to express the survival of foreign dancers who came across the sea to create a Hawaii in a Korean village called Bugok, along with the tropical plants. I structured the work so that viewers could reflect on our stories of living daily lives for our ideals within each of our lives.”
Under the theme ‘Survival in Fantasy,’ the artist’s works installed on stage are arranged so that visitors can walk among them, encouraging them to experience the lonely feeling behind the fantasy images. Behind the supports holding the paintings, the oral accounts of interviewees whom the artist met during the conceptualization of the works are fully displayed, stimulating the viewers’ imagination through the visualization of sentences.
Kumho Museum of Art held the first part of the 2022 Kumho Young Artist exhibition, featuring solo exhibitions of three out of six selected Korean artists under the age of 35 through the 19th Kumho Young Artist Contest.
Park Dasom’s “Techniques of the Body,” which explores concerns about the body through transformed frames in painting, presents a new perspective on the body with melting-like tilts, curved shapes, and organically connected masses of various sizes and forms.
Under the theme “Orbit of Weight,” Heo Woojung combined the infinity of patterns and the finiteness of the canvas to create 30 variations in a series, producing an abstract space with new patterns. Heo said, “I wanted to serve as a reference point and ask viewers how to perceive a space beyond the image where nothing exists,” adding, “Through this, I wanted to convey that the cognition of non-existence, assuming existence, is the starting point for inferring a cross-section of infinity.”
The exhibition runs until April 24 at Kumho Museum of Art. Following this, the second part of the exhibition will feature solo shows by Muniperi, Lee Dahee, and Jo Haena.
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