Instead of a result, a process : 이춘환, 홍순명, 홍성준, 피정원

SEOJUNG ART and M5 Gallery are pleased to present the group exhibition “Instead of a result, a process”, opening at M5 Gallery on the 14th of June 2023. Featuring four cross-generational Korean Artists - Chounhwan Lee, Hong Soun, Seongjoon Hong, and Jungwon Phee - the show delves into the core relationship between the artists’ subject of investigation, and how its presence influences, determines, and transforms the practice of pictorial and sculptural rendering.

Historically, in Korean art, the role of gesture and method has held significant importance in artistic practice, becoming indexical of the wider motifs that inform the making of art itself, blending them in that specific moment in which the brush touches the canvas, or the hands mold or assemble the sculpture. This processual element becomes the focal point of investigation for the understanding of the four artists presented, all developing a specific style profoundly iterative in its conversation with the semantic field it expresses.

Deriving from Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic investigation of the artwork and its ability to convey at once the real, the symbolic, and the imaginary realms, this exhibition aims to portray how the gestural process, serving as a door to such fields of inquiry, has enabled the artists to manifest their complex cosmologies into various degrees of abstraction, alteration, sublimation, accumulation, and synthesis.

Featuring four cross-generational Korean Artists - Chounhwan Lee, Hong Soun, Seongjoon Hong, and Jungwon Phee - the show delves into the core relationship between the artists’ subject of investigation, and how its presence influences, determines, and transforms the practice of pictorial and sculptural rendering.

Chounhwan Lee (b.1956) originally started his pictorial practice with traditional ink paintings, then embarked on a journey through complete abstraction and lining into color field painting throughout the decades. This stylistic transformation has been a result of ongoing interest and inquiry into the element of nature, searching for that element of the fundamental truth that encompasses all things existing through its laws. The three works presented at M5 are part of the “Light+Grain Series”, one that is characterized by pure abstraction, rendering on canvas through the dots and lines the profound act of meditation done in order to absorb and understand light, to then reveal its depth and essence through the gradients presented on canvas.

Hong Soun(b.1959) reinterprets the modalities of perception of landscape, touching both the realm of the real and its reconstruction through the alteration of visual memories. Interested in the peculiar yet fundamental relationship between terror and beauty presented in the human psyche when in front of nature in both its peaceful and disastrous force, Hong’s practice derives from an ongoing quest for the properties of the Kantian essence of the sublime. The two paintings presented - Wildfires (2022), and Oblique Memory-Sea (2022) - are part of the “Sidescape” series, in which Hong recontextualizes images from natural, human, or socio-political aspects by focusing on specific segments in order to recombine them on canvas, fragmenting and reconstructing a perception with a newfound property that transcends the realm of the real, entering its symbolic connotation.

In a similar manner, for the sculptural work Paengmok(2015), as part of the Memoryscape series, the artist works with objects trouvée in sites of disasters or accidents as eyewitnesses with soaked memories within them. By combining the various objects and wrapping them with many layers of plastic and fabric, the sculpture acquires an amorphous shape in which the objects contained are unidentifiable. By doing so the sculptural work becomes a bearer of forgotten memories.

Seongjoon Hong (b.1987) focuses on the study of painting and its perception, in a personal evolution of what the psychological element of gestalt would recognize as the investigation of the configuration of the various elements in their combination. For the artist, this process is conceptualized and rendered through the act of layering, in which the modalities of perception and their rendering on canvas found their way in a synthetical transformation. If the observer can only perceive the result of the act of blending layer over layer into canvas, this minimal rendering is only the final manifestation of a much more meticulous process. Starting from a photographic matrix, the pictures taken are then dissected into their color elements and then juxtaposed one by one. The pictorial practice becomes not only an exercise style but also an investigation of the inner self through abstraction.

For Jungwon Phee(b.1993), abstraction is both an aesthetic, gestural, and symbolic field for the investigation, representation and perhaps resolution of the memories of the self. In this ongoing generative tension, rendered in a pictorial process of confluence, the artist uses firstly Korean black ink (Muk) or gesso as pure abstraction and negative space, to then coating layers of thick and intense matière able to channel and elaborate a process that breaks the controlled unconscious of the negative space in each crack and aggregation. The large-scale painting presented, part of the “Black Path” series, invites the observer to delve into the powerful property of art of speaking to the self and of the self, mirroring our gaze, and unveiling its metexical property and auratic dimension: the semantic field of the artwork is activated only in relation to its observer, opening an intimate conversation for everyone to delve into.

In the work presented at M5 gallery, the four artists embody at large the ongoing and fundamental quest of both art as a philosophy and a practice for the sublimation of inner and outer cosmologies into gesture. This processual path is an endless journey, which finds its peculiar resolution in time, but never stops, as it represents the very property of techne’ - the ability to make art - tackling, one by one, the inspirations and challenges that make this discipline so intrinsically bound and necessary to human existence.

VENUE

M5 Gallery, Tokyo, Japan 

LOCATION
1F Shin Yurakucho Bldg., 1-12-1 Yurakucho, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 100-0006, Japan

Curated by Valentina Buzzi