Kim Kim, Seoul
For its first participation in ART-O-RAMA, Korean gallery Kim Kim will show important and prominent contemporary South Korean artists who worked from the beginning of the 1990’s, when the first signs of change in Korea’s contemporary art scene were showing. They tirelessly explore and display the working of concepts, mentalities, patterns, and standards represented through Korean art.
The selected artists will show strategy, style and series of steps, which deal with the scope of change and alteration within the framework of Korean society, putting them in relation to the international art scene. The show entitled “Sympathy for Mr. & Lady Vengeance” comes from The Vengeance Trilogy (2002-2005), a series of Korean films by Park Chan-Wook. The art works will reference to the traditions of their native culture and comment, in both a meditative and critical way, on contemporary Korean society’s complex, often contradictory, relationship with the West.
The artists’ different methods as well as their attitude, fields of work, and idiosyncrasies, represent various movements and changes in contemporary Korean art, and show different perspectives of cultural progress sustained through these alterations. Kim Beom works at the intersection of the animate and inanimate. His works iterate a critique of repressive social norms. Chung Seoyoung’s work shows the fine demarcation between existence and non-existence. Juyeun Park work involves the limitations of verbal language “more from a concern than an interest, originating from everyday frustrations and insecurities.” Jae-Hwan Joo is a founding member of “Reality and Utterance”,he portrays ordinary objects. Nakhee Sung creates a space that reveals an elusive vision of sensitivities through a simple and visual language.