Feature image: 021gallery Seokheon Jang Installation View courtesy of 021gallery
021gallery Hosts ‘AXIS 2024’
Annually held by 021 Gallery, ‘AXIS 2024’ is a young artist project. It is a curated exhibition that aims to serve as a foundation of creative activities for promising emerging artists to dedicate to their work. The AXIS exhibition seeks to create a platform for artists from Daegu and other regions to expand the scope of their exhibitions and artistic practices by interacting with each other beyond their home regions.
This year's 'AXIS 2024' will be held in Part 1 and 2. Part 1 will be on display from August 24 to October 9, featuring artists Kajin Kim, Kai Oh, Seongmin Lee, and Seokheon Jang, who have been actively exhibiting both domestically and internationally. Kajin Kim longs for human's desire for connection in the disembodied daily life of the digital age, Kai Oh delves into the fluidity of digital photography images, Seongmin Lee expresses multi-layered meanings through text-combined images that depict the anxiety and pleasure of the digital age, and Seokheon Jang visualizes incomplete selves, expanding portraits, and the accidentality and continuity of life by language. This exhibition showcases around 30 works across various genres, including photography, installation, and painting.
Kajin Kim explores the complexity of the desire to connect to one another in an everyday world where relationships between people are mediated and disembodied by the internet and media technologies. Utilizing transparent light embedded surfaces, screen, print media and multiple projections, Kim creates structures in which the displayed images evoke a sense of touch, and light transcends physical boundaries to expand the presence of the image. Kim, in the isolation of the digital age, offers visual art as an answer to the fundamental human need for contact. Kim’s works go beyond simple images to show a cross-section of the times we live in and offer a new perspective on human relationships.
“Without mass and solidity, light is an intangible illusion, an immaterial existence that can be ephemeral when it is switched off. But that is why it is able to cross physical boundaries, to embed or penetrate the surfaces of other beings, and to occupy space. As light reveals the permeability of material surfaces, the materiality is abstracted and the image extends its presence beyond and behind the surface. The sense of touch that is awakened is delicate, yet wistful and desperate”
Kai Oh's artistic focus revolves around expanding the boundaries of photography, capturing the non-human-centric life force in urban spaces through her lens. Oh places a particular emphasis on the fluidity of digital images, exploring their inherent possibilities. By bringing digital images from the computer into physical space, Oh challenges conventional norms and the historical values linked to flat images/surfaces on the wall, crafting otherworldly scenarios within the space. In particular, Oh pays attention to the ‘bizarity,’ reinterpreting objects and landscapes with a new perspective by utilizing the transformation and parasitism of nature within cities and the characteristics of digital images. The digital collage technique Oh has been using presents various possibilities beyond the retouched image of a single photograph, and recently, has been expanding the scope of the work through new media such as glass and ceramics.
“I am a photographer because most things are rigid. I feel great joy in touching, processing, and making connections between physical materials such as wood, stone, and found objects. However, I realized that physical materials cannot be as flexible as digital photographs. A photo, which is a moment fixed in time, starts to have infinite possibilities upon being transferred into digital space. A photo expands beyond its original form and becomes a complex narrative device through edits. I love how the picture turns into the pure potential for elasticity when projected on the computer screen.”
Seongmin Lee unfolds the chaotic reality of the digital age onto the canvas. With its background of familiar spaces in daily lives, such as night clubs and cyberspace, Lee projects our appearance through the image mixed of pleasure and anxiety, reality and virtuality, while delivering a message of hope. Using the unique texture of bunchae (traditional Korean mineral pigments), Lee adds depth to the picture and imbues it with multi-layered meanings by combining text and image. This visual language, seemingly like a code, draws attention to the anxiety about the future of humanity and the sense of alienation felt by individuals. Lee’s work serves as a mirror reflecting the darker aspects of our society, beyond the painting. Lee constantly poses questions to us. ‘Who am I?’, ‘What kind of world do I want to live in?’ Through the works, we start the journey to find answers to these questions.
"My work involves observing the underbelly of society and using visual media to metaphorically represent reality. I am interested in the structures of society that collide and coexist at the same time, and this is my way of understanding how society is structured and functions. Constantly searching for the dystopias of the present, I express them through visual media. Collected data is simultaneously story told in fragmented screens, through relatedness among images the dichotomously disaggregated boundary is destroyed, and I convey the process that blurs the boundary between senses. Through this process, I extract the sentimental qualities of two gaps and as if compressing layers onto a single surface, I make a metaphor and weave the enormous reality world.
Seokheon Jang places the contemporary period’s incompleteness and uncertainty which is difficult to characterize the concept of 'self' at the center of the work. His self-portraits form a boundless state where the boundary of self and other, subject and object are dissolved, by equating the language as human, it visually expresses life’s accidentality, continuity and behavior. Through materials such as paper and tracing paper, Jang reveals the fragility and unfinished state of self-portraits. In particular, the works using tracing paper, through the layer laid one upon another, shows that a person is not one simple layer. Rather than delivering a specific message to the audience, Jang provides an opportunity to unfamiliarly view and reflect ourselves and it is completed through interaction. After all, it is a self-portrait and portrait of both ‘you’ and ‘I’.
"We are the languages of each. Based on such language, I added (life’s) accidentality・continuity・behavior, to specify ‘I’ into a visual language. The languages on the screen, with their sources jumbled, get accumulated randomly(accidentally). - Much like the unpredictable, unchosen paths of our lives-”
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