Gallery BK will hold its March group exhibition, Borderless Universe, from March 17 to April 14 at BK Hannam. The show will examine the processes through which the four artists, Joolee Kang, Byungjoo Kim, Seonghi Bahk, and Haiyun Jung, have employed various sets of mixed media to explore and expand the breadth of their practices. The painterly objects, given new roles albeit fully expressing each material’s unique nature and withholding the flexibility to blur existing boundaries, play variations that travel freely between the visitor’s eyes and the exhibition space.

Joolee Kang uses decorative elements to highlight the sovereignty of objects. The fragments, disassembled and jumbled to the degree that the original object is no longer recognizable, are rearranged in such a fashion that retains their decorativeness and completes a finished shape. What used to be an anonymous drawing or objects are reborn in a vivarium occupied by flowers, butterflies, and fluttering birds and conjure a new temporality. The visitor engages Kang’s works via actual space, but they soon take him unawares into their realm of decorative fantasy, stimulating his cognitive views and setting off countless new imaginations.

Byungjoo Kim’s works are noted for positioning themselves at the boundary of painting and sculpture and are often referred to as architectural sculptures or spatial drawing sculptures. His three-dimensional structures are made without any “surfaces,” allowing visitors the freedom of reconfiguration and serving as the devices that enable visitors to swim freely within the imagination and engage in a multilayered experience. Kim’s works, a singular type of spatiality on their own and a unique symbolism, sustain their immortal existences with a sense of resolute autonomy against the layers of time that attempt to bind them.

Seonghi Bahk focuses on the visual perception of the viewer. His work reveals its originally intended form only when seen from a specific viewpoint, a feat of meticulous optical illusion achieved by probing into the falsehood of human vision. Made of countless hanging mobile pieces, the smallest of movements is enough to disrupt the viewer’s vision and ruin the form they intend to assemble. Bahk’s sculptures suggest that even countless, irregularly-placed fragments could serve as the source of sincere contemplation and appreciation when one fully understands the imperfectness between the seen object and the person seeing.

Haiyun Jung paints landscapes, drawers, birds, and figures on Korean paper. A chest of drawers is storage furniture, not only for containing objects but also for hiding the things we want to conceal, and it also functions as a device that could temporarily take care of our thoughts. Assuming that the numerous drawers in Jung’s paintings contain unique memories and emotions in each one of them, the aggregate of them could be seen as the numerous relationships human beings have. The bird, thread, and stone in her paintings are intermediaries that indirectly visualize the various relationships and attitudes in human society and the burden of life. Her imagery is often placid and motionless, but behind the veil lies a quiet, turbulent storm in which each man bears the weight of his life and interacts with each other.

Kang, Kim, Bahk, and Jung each speak in a visual language, and artistic practice unique to one’s own, but a common aspect they share is that they all earnestly place the “human being” — the being that has a relationship with everything — at the heart of their oeuvre. The four artists overthrow the preexisting relationships between the two-dimensional and the three-dimensional, human and non-human, art and technology, and at the same time, recreate the relationships. Please allow us to invite you into their expanded worlds, brimming with new energy from the trips between reality and fiction and the changes in roles they have taken.

Gallery BK