K-Artists
Carefully curates and introduces three representative artists from the Korean contemporary art scene each week since the 2000s.
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Articles
Artist Jungin Kim’s ‘Open Paintings’: Imagining Through Landscapes of Fragmented Memories
Jungin Kim (b. 1991) has been creating what he calls “open paintings,” in which seemingly unrelated fragments of memory are placed together on a single canvas, prompting viewers to lose their way within the work and imagine their own stories. These fragments of memory, akin to pixels, are regarded as individuals; through the process of grafting them onto the canvas, an image of “solidarity” emerges.
2025.11.03
Articles
[Essay] A Light Monologue
Last year, the armful or so of Korean pine I’d amassed felt like dots, scattered here and there through my workshop. Take away one section, and another would appear.
2023
Articles
Artist Seong Joon Hong: On the Layers of Painting
Seong Joon Hong (b. 1987) has pursued a sustained inquiry into the layers of painting—its overlapping strata—and the fundamental questions they raise. Through a process of building up multiple layers, the artist engages with the essential structure of painting itself, while also internalizing these strata as sedimentations of memory and time, or evoking synesthetic illusions that merge sight and touch. In doing so, Hong reveals the expansive possibilities inherent in the medium of painting.
2026.02.16
Articles
[Critique] Bloated Surfaces and Fragile Image Strategies
A spherical form made of steel is covered with sharp iron cones protruding like spikes, and on one side of it sits a rectangular image. Careful not to let one’s gaze be captured by the threatening cones jutting out as if they might pierce, one cautiously looks into the image and encounters a ray of light that appears to be an exit, seen within a cave or the ruins of a collapsed building.
2023
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Articles
[Critique] Caressing The Skin of History
In a past interview, Song Sanghee spoke about her “desire to stand up straight on a spot, something like a blade of a knife.”1 Her works were then engaging with a sharp identity politics as a non-disabled heterosexual woman from South Korea.
2017
Exhibitions
《MNEMOSYNE – A River of Memory》, 2024.10.10 - 2025.01.31, Um Museum
For modern people, forgetting is something to be feared. Ironically, however, the culture of collective amnesia in contemporary society continues to accelerate. While new technologies are astonishing, their remarkable capabilities gradually diminish both our will to remember and our capacity for memory. Here is an artist who resists the crisis of collective forgetting by replacing the mechanically reproducible image of photography with the unique originality of hand-crafted work, connecting the ‘you’ of yesterday with the ‘I’ of today.
2024.10.08
