The Embassy of the Republic of Korea to Canada and the Korean Cultural Centre Canada present Closer when apart :the Korean Emerging Artists Exhibition: at the Korean Cultural Centre Gallery from Thursday, July 18th to Tuesday, September 17th in collaboration with the School of Visual Arts at the Korea National University of Arts.

With an aim to encourage communications and creative exchanges among the next generation of artists between Korea and Canada, the Embassy of Korea and the KCC launched a new program series called The Korean Emerging Artists Exhibition. This series is expected to create new partnership with Canadian counterparts by initiating interests in Korean emerging artists and art schools within Canadian art community; and finally resulting in establishing substantial human and institutional exchanges between Korea and Canada.

For the first series of this program, the School of Visual Arts at the Korea National University of Arts (K-Arts) is partnering with the KCC. Established by the Korean Government in 1992, the K-Arts focuses on raising young artists who engage with contemporary issues and create the classics of the future; a cradle for thinking that goes deeper, and imagination that grows ever wider. The University has 6 arts schools under its belt including the School of Visual Arts, Music, Drama, Film·TV·Multimedia, Dance and Korean Traditional Arts.

The School of Visual Arts at the K-Arts fosters professional artists capable of meeting the needs of the rapidly changing social, political and cultural environment of the 21st Century. For this, the School works to implement advanced and futuristic pathways in art education. As Korea’s only college of fine arts to embrace all the fields of visual arts, including plastic arts, design, architecture and artistic theory, the School of Visual Arts breaks with tradition to set a new model for art education grounded in creative, enterprising and integrated thinking, rather than individual genres or media.

Curated by Yeon-Yong Kim, an artist, curator and Professor of the School of Visual Arts at the K-Arts, closer when apart: the Korean Emerging Artists Exhibition introduces the works by four graduate students from the School, including Hyeree Ro, Vak Dongkyun, Sunho Park and Dahae Chang who were selected by the School’s jury committee in 2018, exclusively for this exhibition.

Hyeree Ro is interested in how objects can relate to the body. Finding various ways to relate them lies as the background for her performances. Her sculptural, performative, and narrative-based works embody various aspects of life such as personal history, memories, places, cities, language, body, movement, and stories. Ro’s previous exhibitions include her solo exhibition <LA-sung> at 777 Gallery in 2017, and numerous group exhibitions at Yangju Chang Ucchin Museum of Art, Art Space Pool, HITE Collection, Doosan Gallery, and Arario Museum in Space.

Vak Dongkyun observes the visual manifestations that occur in the connection between different materials and images, and is experimenting with the possibility of the advent of generic images through producing a series of photographic images. He posits technology, science, and commercial as a result and extension of material-induced behavior, and explores the equal but weak link between materiality and image derived from objects. Vak recently had a solo exhibition <UU: Universal Universe>(Archive Bomm, Seoul, 2019). This year, he has participated in the group exhibitions called <Take Me Home>(Platform-L Contemporary Art Center, Seoul, 2019) and <ACC Youth Club>(Asia Culture Center, Gwangju, 2019). Vak has shown at Seoul Museum of Art, Culture Station Seoul 284, ThisWeekendRoom, École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris. In 2017, he was awarded the Mirae Award 2017(Canon Korea Consumer Imaging Inc.).

Sunho Park questions the standard of people’s preference towards particular images in the current digital media environment where information and images are readily available. In her works, very specific and practical visual images such as photographs and videos and the social and cultural backgrounds surrounding them are shown by combining them in a variety of ways with written language. Park had her solo exhibition <Mystery Editorial> in Ilhyun Museum of Art Euljiro Space in 2018 and participated in group exhibitions including <Seoul Times>(Hui Gallery, Hong Kong, 2019) and <Stones between Stanza>(Woosuk Gallery, Seoul, 2018).

Dahae Chang mainly explores traditional or romantic attitudes towards landscape considering technical supports for images alongside. She is primarily interested in the way painting makes objects look clear and more transparent, with the question about what ‘in clean condition’ means kept in mind. She has exhibited her works in a solo exhibition «Built in»(archive bomm, Seoul, 2018), also participated in group exhibitions including «Take Me Home(Platform-L Contemporary Art Center, Seoul, 2019)», «PACK F/W 2017(Mudaeylug and others, Seoul, 2018)». 

Yeon-Yong Kim explains "This exhibition examines the artistic rationale and practice of four young artists who have recently graduated from K-Arts. However, it is not an exhibition that only presents the educational achievements of the K-Arts nor is it an exhibition that represents a particular trend of contemporary Korean art through the temporary relationship of the unspecified individual works. Rather, it is aimed to focus on the various aesthetic experiments of young artists ‘here and now’ and to view the perspective, attitude, and process towards the world seen by them. In particular, this exhibition wishes to transform the space of Korean Cultural Centre into a dynamic cultural arena where various features of the different worlds intersect constantly, through the encounter with the disparate worlds (things, images, and media) shown in the works. It is not easy to grasp the diversity of the world presented by the artists from a single point of view, as it is difficult to combine the various media, genres, forms of art, methods, and attitudes of this exhibition into one framework. Nevertheless, through this exhibition, we wish to respond sensitively to the changing flow of the world and hope that the idiosyncrasy of the young artists on the convergent reason beyond the boundaries of media, the openness to artistic practice, the production of values of art becomes a starting point for new reasons in the cultural exchange." 

Yongsup Kim, Director of the Korean Cultural Centre also mentions that this exhibition is expected to pave the way to deepen mutual understanding and collaboration between Korean and Canadian arts community of the next generation by bridging them to communicate each other’s artistic opinion and viewpoints in various issues around them.

All the participating artists will attend the opening vernissage on Thursday, July 18th starting at 6pm. At this opening, Hyeree Ro will also present her 2016 performance piece <LA-sung>. Finally, the performance will be followed by an artist talk which will be led by Jinny Yu, the well-known Korean-Canadian artist and Professor of Visual Art at the University of Ottawa.

The opening is free for the public, but reservation is recommended.

Please R.S.V.P. here.

Exhibition:

Thursday, July 18th ~Tuesday, September 17th

9am~5pm (The KCC Gallery is closed on weekends.)

Vernissage

Thursday, July 18th 6~9pm

Performance <LA-sung> by Hyeree Ro (2016, 9 mins)

Artist Talk with Jinny Yu, (Moderator, Painter, Professor of Visual Art at the University of Ottawa)

Please R.S.V.P here.

Venue:

The Korean Cultural Centre Gallery

(150 Elgin St., Unit 101, Ottawa, ON, K2P 1L4)

613-233-8008 (ext. 201)

canada@korea.kr / http://canada.korean-culture.org/ko/9/contents/584

Organized by: The Embassy of the Republic of Korea to Canada, The Korean Cultural Centre Canada, and the Korea National University of Arts School of Visual Arts,

Supported by: The Korea National University of Arts Foundation