[Exhibition of the Week] Akio Igarashi Solo Exhibition · 2024 Gyeonggi Artist Spotlight 外

Editor's NoteThis week's exhibitions summarize and introduce a variety of attractive exhibitions that can be seen nationwide over the course of one week.

▲'Exploration of Mono-ha' Part 2, Akio Igarashi Solo Exhibition = Gallery Shilla Seoul presents the second part of the 'Exploration of Mono-ha' project exhibition featuring a solo exhibition by Akio Igarashi.

Akio Igarashi, Drawing by drawing, Pencil on paper, 427x142cm Photo by Gallery Shilla

Akio Igarashi is an artist who has maintained his unique artistic world for over 60 years in the Japanese contemporary art scene through geometric abstract painting and minimal painting. His works are characterized by the unique texture of the canvas surface created by carving and sanding the painting. The colors are limited to monotones such as gray, black, and white, so at first glance, his works evoke the solid and smooth texture of stone or architectural surfaces.

The artist's early works from the 1970s were rough to the extent that the canvas was pierced and the back of the canvas was visible. The important artistic language appearing on the surface is the accumulation of repetitive acts of drawing, carving, and erasing, which is a crucial point that manifests his warm painting rather than a cold geometric abstraction.

From the late 1960s to the early 1970s, when Igarashi was active, the Japanese art scene, at the forefront of East Asian art, closely exchanged influences with American painting. Unlike American artists who created and then abandoned Minimal Art, he reinterpreted it into his own work. He places no purpose or achievement in flatness itself, and there is nothing he intends to express through painting. However, his painting composition is so modern and sophisticated that it is hard to believe it was created over 60 years ago.

Painting 22-120B. 193.9 x 193.9, Oil on canvas, 2022. [Photo by Gallery Shilla]

The artist, who held his first solo exhibition in Korea last year at Gallery Shilla Daegu, explained his artistic world at the time: "Looking back, my painting work has been a continuous process of drawing and carving. To be honest, in recent years, I have been creating the surface of paintings more by carving than drawing. I can say that I am exploring the possibilities of painting through this repetitive act."

A representative from Gallery Shilla said, "Through this exhibition, following 20 years of steadily introducing the spirit of Mono-ha, which is 'encountering the world as it is,' to Korea, we prepared the 'Exploration of Mono-ha' project exhibition to further expand the Mono-ha program in 2024. This Akio Igarashi exhibition is the second in a trilogy of planned exhibitions and will be a great opportunity to deeply explore Mono-ha and its aftermath from a profound perspective." The exhibition runs until August 16 at Gallery Shilla Seoul, 111 Samcheong-ro, Jongno-gu, Seoul.

Pudding Heart-Laundry, 2023, colored resin, human miniature, 38x38x4cm (Including frame) [Photo by Vitri Gallery]

▲Lee Yeoreum Solo Exhibition 'SWEETCH: Sweet Healing' = Vitree Gallery presents Lee Yeoreum's solo exhibition 'SWEETCH: Sweet Healing.' This exhibition is the first in two years since the 2022 exhibition 'Life in Ice Cream.' The exhibition title SWEETCH is a compound word of sweetness and switch, meaning to 'summon forgotten precious memories and recollections back to happiness.'

The artist positively reconstructs the anxious and dark memories latent in modern people's inner selves and summons them to happiness. Using ice cream as a theme, which evokes a sense of happiness through sweet gustatory objects, the artist expands the scope of work in various ways. In this exhibition, new works such as Dalgona, Maketto?a new form of healing bear?Sweet Heart, and Melt Ice Cream will be presented.

The new 'Dalgona' series recalls a joyful scene from childhood memories by combining the sweet and crispy dalgona candy made in childhood with toys played with at that time. The artist simultaneously makes viewers recognize symbolic mediators that evoke latent memories and sweet gustatory objects, thereby eternally preserving happy memories and positively reconstructing negative emotional memories, offering sweet healing.

This summer's 'Sweetch Sweet Healing' exhibition view. [Photo by Vitri Gallery]

The various materials and everyday forms expressed within the sweet works add a cozy sense of happiness when multiple works are exhibited together, as if conveying the artist's intention. The artist explained, "The world becomes sweeter when shared with neighbors, friends, lovers, and family?people close to me. They are friends who understand each other's lives, empathize together, share future values, and move forward together."

Through works that look sweet just by viewing, the artist transforms moments in latent memories into sweet recollections, offering sweet healing to the audience. The exhibition runs until August 10 at Vitree Gallery, 111 Wausan-ro, Mapo-gu, Seoul.

Eunsuk Kim, 'Signal'
[Photo by Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art]

▲2024 Gyeonggi Artist Spotlight 'Kim Eun-sook & Min Seong-hong Exhibition' = The Gyeonggi Museum of Art, operated by the Gyeonggi Cultural Foundation (Director Jeon Seung-bo), presents the 2024 Gyeonggi Artist Spotlight 'Kim Eun-sook & Min Seong-hong Exhibition.' The 'Gyeonggi Artist Spotlight' is an artist support program conducted in cooperation between the Gyeonggi Museum of Art and the Arts Headquarters of the Gyeonggi Cultural Foundation to promote the stable growth of mid-career artists. The exhibition aims to densely realize the artistic worlds of mid-career artists who have continued unique creative activities in the Korean contemporary art scene while expressing the regional characteristics of Gyeonggi Province.

Marking its third year, the 2024 Gyeonggi Artist Spotlight selects installation artists Kim Eun-sook and Min Seong-hong. This exhibition goes beyond the concept of presenting new works, concentrating representative works that served as footholds for the artists until now, their arduous creative processes, and the expanded artistic worlds materialized in new works in one space. Additionally, an 'Archival Zone' was established based on the connection points between the two artists' unique spaces and their research to date. The Archival Zone functions to permeate the artistic worlds of the two artists, who hold the identity of 'Gyeonggi artists,' allowing visitors to grasp the meaning of their work more concretely.

Kim Eun-sook gained attention in the contemporary art scene for works questioning the meaning of 'communication' in our society. Early in her career, the artist subverted or emphasized the meanings of sign systems encountered in daily life, revealing contradictions latent in capitalism. Since 2014, she has been devoted to the theme of 'uncertainty.' Alongside this, she implemented 'signals,' which can be considered means of communication in an era dominated by uncertainty, into her works, deepening her practice by adopting 'international maritime signal flags' used for communication between ships.

The international maritime signal flags consist of 26 flags corresponding to the alphabet, each conveying situations that may occur at sea in a condensed form. Recently, the artist has continued to use these flags as a character system to transform proverbs or sayings back into images. New works such as 'Rabbit in the Submarine and Canary in the Coal Mine' (2024) and 'Red Rose Beside the Grapevine' (2024) intensively showcase Kim Eun-sook's artistic world, which has built an independent signaling system based on her aesthetic concerns.

Min Seonghong, 'Boim-ui Boim'
Photo by Gyeonggi Museum of Art

Min Seong-hong is notable for structurally unraveling the changes and patterns individuals undergo through social interactions. The artist focuses on the relationship between everyday environments and subjects, projecting the experiences of himself and social members onto objective correlatives to visualize them. Inspired by the fact that birds' beaks evolved differently to adapt to their environments, he created various bird forms. These can be seen as representations of the artist himself and motifs representing all social members.

Since the 2010s, Min Seong-hong has focused on objects left behind in places depopulated by urban redevelopment. He moved these objects to his studio, aged them, dismantled, and recombined them to create new structures. Through this method, he completed several series such as 'Overlapped Sensibility,' 'Dasirak (多侍樂),' 'Drift,' and 'Skin_Layer.' Furthermore, in the new work 'Circulating Body' (2024), he endows objects with the ability to move autonomously. This 'body' created by the artist interacts with viewers, generating space and movement. The meticulously constructed 'circulating' body responds to viewers and space, expanding the sensory experience of the audience.

During the exhibition period, 'Talks with the Artists' will also be held. The program will be led by two researchers who have studied each artist (Lim Kyung-min, Head of New Projects at the Korea Art Authentication Research Center, and Jung Il-ju, Editor-in-Chief of Public Art) to draw out in-depth content. The exhibition runs until September 22 at the Gyeonggi Museum of Art, Dongsan-ro, Danwon-gu, Ansan-si, Gyeonggi Province.