Straniamento – Seemingly familiar or seemingly unfamiliar
7 Korean contemporary artists are showcased at Le Murate. Progetti Arte, Florence, Italy from 30 March to 29 April, 2017, featuring approximately 20 art works including Photography, Video, Performance, Painting, Sculpture. This exhibition was started by two Korean independent curators, Jiyoung LEE(Representative of Platform A) and Kko-kka LEE (former Head of Planning and the academic program for Busan Biennale 2016), who are interested in promoting Korean art abroad, and have worked in collaboration with the director of Florence Korea Film Fest, Riccardo Gelli from Taegukgi, Toscana Korea Association and the Artistic Director of Le Murate and the Progetti Arte Contemporanea, Valentina Gensini. As an extension of the Florence Korea Film Fest 2017 (23 March to 31 March), the exhibition hopes to broaden the understanding and appreciation of Korean culture in Toscana, Italy. Straniamento is an Italian word meaning Defamilarization which expresses the curators’ intention to promote a dialogue between Italian audiences and unfamiliar Korean contemporary artworks so as to expose and explore shared feelings and common values.
Participating Artists BAE Chanhyo, GUEM Minjeong, HAN Sungpil, KANG Yiyun, KIM Jongku, WON Seoungwon, YEOM Jihye (Alphabetical Order) Curators: LEE Jiyoung, LEE Kko-Kka (Alphabetical Order) Host: Platform A Organizer: Comune di Firenze, Muse and Le Murate. Progetti Arte Contemporanea, Taegukgi (Toscana Korea Association) Sponsor: Arts Council Korea More about the Artists
Chanhyo BAE Since graduating from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2007, Chanhyo Bae has expressed in his work the feelings of cultural and emotional estrangement he experienced when he first came to study in England. His Existing in Costume series saw him posing in a variety of female historical western costumes. Researched in meticulous detail, he created elaborate scenes of himself as a noblewoman from the Elizabethan up to the Regency period. More recent work has drawn further on the idea of placing oneself into a collective consciousness within the dimensions of nationality. He has chosen as his subject the realms of western fairytales: stories that have permeated our culture and become embedded into our general psyche. His current series depicts the subject of punishment related to the exercise of power. Minjeong GUEM Minjeong Geum lives and works in Seoul. She works with various media such as sculpture, video, performance and site-specific installation. Collective memory and space are integral to the Guem’s concerns and research. Focusing on the historical context and density which certain spaces possess, the artist extracts specific interior and architectural features as a framework for her visual representation. She recreates private and public spaces and constructs new and ambiguous narratives. Guem holds a DFA from Yonsei University, Seoul and MFA and BFA from Hongik University, Seoul. She has completed large public art project commissions by Lexus and Samsonite in Seoul and Busan. In 2014, Guem took part in the ‘Green River’ project Korea/Taiwan Exchange Artist Residency in Tamsui, Taiwan. Her works are held in private and public collections including Kumho Museum of Art and Seoul Museum of Art. Sungpil HAN Sungpil Han creates art mainly using photography, moving images, and installations to support and examine philosophical subjects such as environmental issues, originalities, and relationships between reality [real] and representation [fake]. He also enjoys understanding diverse cultures and exploring nature, further interpreting our everyday world. Sungpil’s sensibility in his work often includes a sense of humor, while including sublime elements of beauty. He received a BFA in photography from Chung-Ang University, Korea and completed an MA in Curating Contemporary Design, a joint program offered by Kingston University and the Design Museum, London in U.K. Yiyun KANG Yiyun Kang is internationally recognised for her projection mapping installations. Rather than focusing on the making of objects, she explores the cultivation of relational environments through spatial projection mapping installations. Her work has been exhibited in a number of museums and galleries in Europe, Asia and the US and she has taken part in several residency programmes, including that of the Victoria and Albert Museum (London) and Korea’s National Museum of Contemporary Art. Her work has been shown at Seoul Museum of Art, Taipei Museum of Contemporary Art and the Venice Architecture Biennale 2014. She holds a BA in Fine Arts from Seoul National University and a MA in Fine Arts from UCLA’s Design & Media Arts department. Upon completion of her MFA in the United States, Kang worked and taught in Korea for 3 years, subsequently moving to London, where she is currently working and pursuing a PhD at the Royal College of Art.
Jongku KIM Trained as a sculptor, Kim has worked primarily with steel powder on raw canvas since the late 1990s. By laboriously grinding down iron rods, Kim reduces the solid iron into filings, turning a strong, cold material into a soft and delicate one. He brushes the powder onto the canvas with a stream-of- consciousness poetic approach using calligraphic forms. He uses polymer glue to bind the steel powder to the canvas. Created horizontally, the canvases are then raised vertically, allowing gravity to pull any loose powder downward. The words written in Korean are not read left-to-right or right-to- left, but instead flow in a non-linear path. It is not important that we understand each word because the meaning of the poem surrenders to the meaning expressed by the whole painting. They are poetic landscapes. In his de-materialization of steel, a material source of modern warfare and commercialism, Kim is also representing a humbling of humankind’s perpetual need for progress.
Won Seoung WON Won creates scenes which combine actual photography with edited images, intermingled in a way which makes it almost impossible to separate reality from illusion. Though photographic they are so well executed as to appear to have been painted. However, Won uses specific qualities and features of photography to capture and convey reality and truth in her work. This requires countless edits and takes much time to complete in contrast to her initial drawings which she executes rapidly. This method reveals the process of conflict between consciousness and unconsciousness very vividly. The long journey to find things and scenes in reality begins when an idea sketch is done. Then, the hundreds of scenes collected by the camera during the journey are assembled as an exquisite collage. Like the ‘found object’ of surrealists, images of things are removed from their context and given new meanings that embody the artist’s intention and desire with numerous coincidences and inevitabilities having been reintegrated. It is in the gaps of space and time that otherworldly things are created with such great effort and, though they are otherworldly, they were born from reality.
Jihye YEOM After participating in numerous residency programs in Ghana, Iran, Palestine, Brazil, and Colombia, Yeom currently lives and works in Seoul, Korea. She is interested in socio-political stories in relation to places, mainly working with single channel video installation. Her recent solo show was All Exiles Have A Hidden Luck at Art Sonje Center (Seoul, 2015) exploring the complex and ironic concept of exile that is voluntary and involuntary at the same time, social but extremely individual, and that is about physical transfer and at the same time about mental nomadism. She participated in national and international group shows including Under My Skin, HITE Collection (Seoul, 2015) and Welcome to Media Space (Seoul, 2014). Jihye Yeom received her BFA from Seoul National University, an MA from Central Saint Martins and an MFA from Goldsmiths, University of London.