[Gallery Walk] Diverse 'Painting Stories' Like Seven Colors

Kumho Museum of Art Special Exhibition 'Current Screens'
Exhibition of 7 Young Painters
Highlighting Experimentation and Diversity in Contemporary Painting Media

An exhibition that offers insight into the human inner self and essence through the paintings of seven contemporary artists who recognize their surrounding environment and reality is coming to the audience.

Jang Jongwan, 'Gentle Hint', 2022, Acrylic gouache on linen, 112.2x145.5cm
[Photo courtesy of Kumho Museum of Art]

Geumho Museum of Art in Sagan-dong, Jongno-gu, Seoul is hosting the exhibition "The Screen of Now," featuring seven domestic artists who are experimenting with sculptural language centered on painting, until October 27.

The exhibition explores multiple layers of stories that artists convey on the canvas using subjects such as natural objects, figures, and things, while also reflecting on the diversity and possibilities of painting.

Dasom Park, Exhibition View of 'Current Screen' at Kumho Museum of Art, 2024
[Photo by Kumho Museum of Art]

Park Dasom unravels her concerns about the body through the physicality of the canvas and paper, which serve as the base of her paintings. Her work, which subverts the relationship between the painting’s base and the image as a method to effectively express the unvisualizable images in dreams, is realized in a new space-time. Several new works, including "Sutin’s Cow" (2024), where parts of fabric pieces are fixed to the wall with tape and the wrinkled fabric’s form is drawn centered on each point, reveal the artist’s expanded contemplation on the body in painting.

Jang Jongwan, who has continued to satirize human blind faith and desire, presents this as a vision of paradise. The landscape, depicted with various symbolic images and vivid colors in an excessively bright and romantic manner, paradoxically questions the feasibility of the ideal society that humans vaguely dream of, while simultaneously evoking a cynical atmosphere.

Choi Su-in, 'Merong', 2024, Oil on canvas, 112.1x112.1cm [Photo courtesy of Kumho Museum of Art]

Choi Suin projects uncomfortable feelings and tension arising from relationships onto natural objects and materializes them. Through these canvases, he aims to visualize hypocritical moments where one secretly harbors expectations or cannot reveal true feelings within relationships with others. While his previous works dealt with universal conflicts experienced in relationships with others, his new works present various expressions of affectionate acts, such as "He gives me butterflies" (2023), which depicts lovers embracing the truths and lies occurring within romantic relationships as entangled waves.

Seo Minjeong, who has continued working based on curiosity about opposing forces such as light and darkness, life and death, noise and silence, weaves the emptiness surrounding death and the time of dawn when everything moves silently to explore the theme of movement and journey. Whereas her past works visualized feelings of alienation and despair from a reality where communication is impossible, along with an optimistic attitude that strives to move beyond failure, this exhibition expresses the process of transition and the energy of change between dual forces such as light and darkness, life and death.

Hye-Kyung Kwon, Exhibition View of 'Current Screen' at Kumho Museum of Art, 2024
Photo by Kumho Museum of Art

Kwon Hyekyung attempts a new way of presenting paintings through abstract paintings where motifs are symbolized. The artist begins her work by projecting places or situations she has personally experienced onto objects, which serve as important devices accumulating her memories and emotions. During her studies in Germany, she expressed her inevitable status as a foreigner by placing herself on the periphery or likening herself to objects that lost their original function and were pushed out of people’s attention. She continuously pursues reflection through painting while expanding her work.

Jung Deokhyun depicts questions about objective viewing through portraits of objects faintly drawn in darkness. Based on his past experience working briefly in a factory, he began expressing stories about individual labor within social systems by likening them to objects such as machine parts. As he addressed various problems occurring around him, different objects naturally appeared, expanding from portraits of his colleagues and social members to facets of Korean society.

Jihee Kim, 'Completely Captivated', 2023, gouache on Arches paper, 137x131cm
[Photo courtesy of Kumho Museum of Art]

Jihee Kim has recently taken a new interest in the concept of gardens and expresses various senses through images of strange plants. The artist, who has dismantled the stereotyped notions of subjects and rearranged them in her own sculptural way, has long expressed images of transformed bodies that have undergone cutting, mutilation, and separation through painting and installation based on her interest in the body and physicality. Moving beyond these previous works, in her "Garden" series (2022?), she translates the constantly changing appearance of plants in artificially constructed, privately tailored spaces into imaginary plants, metaphorically representing the amorphous human body and newly reinterpreting it as a work expressing the flow of our emotions.

Thus, the participating artists visualize everything from the most intimate emotions and personal stories to reflections on social phenomena in their own unique ways on the canvas. Through their diverse themes and techniques, they stimulate the audience, respond to contemporary phenomena and trends, and communicate.