Soft and Hard: Seoyoung Chang, Paris Giachoustidis, Thomas Pellerey Grogan, Mijung Lee, Changkon Lim, Donghoon Rhee, Fabrice Samyn, Jehyun Shin
SEOJUNG ART SEOUL presents Soft and Hard, a group exhibition that examines our ‘existence’ and the different ‘body’ of artistic subjects, from September 2 to October 19. Featuring eight Korean and international artists, the exhibition goes beyond art history to penetrate human history and asks what and how we should look at the human body with a contemporary perspective, which has appeared in similar and unfamiliar forms in different regions throughout history.
When it comes to art, physicality is an inseparable concept. Art has evolved alongside technology, and even though new topics such as the concept of the 'disembodied body' have been actively researched in recent years, disembodiment in the art scene still remains an undefinable concept. This is because there is a sense of 'tangible and intangible Software and Hardware' of the artist as a subject and creator of art. Their experiences and thoughts, and the way they express them, are, in various senses, a constant source of artistic inspiration and a process of recognizing human existence.
This exhibition focuses on the tangible and intangible senses that make extensive use of the body as a key element of artistic reflection and perception : Thomas Pellerey Grogan, who stimulates the motility of the human body through mixed media combining video and sculpture; Fabrice Samyn, who has been deeply immersed in the concept of visibility through various media; Jehyun Shin, who expresses the overlapping points of individual experience and social contradictions in Korean society in an intuitive and metaphorical way; Paris Giachoustidis, who reflects and visualizes impressions inspired by the hyperreality of our society on the human body; Mijung Lee, who sees the face-image not as an immutable fixed value but as a flexible way that can be modified according to will and circumstance; Chang-kon Lim, who captures the deformed and twisted body muscles on a black surface on unstandardized screens; Seoyoung Jang, who continues to visualize the body with temporality and existence, emphasizing the meaning of existence; and eight other artists.
As such, the 'body' in its various forms has been compared to the universe in both the East and the West, and is a subject that remains unexplored. Soft and Hard therefore questions the concept of the body from a contemporary perspective and re-examines various debates surrounding physicality, such as 'human/non-human' and 'organic/inorganic,' in the realm of visual art and expands its contemporary meaning. This exhibition was organized in collaboration with B. Jun Chae, Associate Curator of the 30th Anniversary Special Exhibition of the Korean Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.
