Gallery Baton presents INDEXING THE NATURE: FROM NEAR AND FAR AWAY, a group exhibition at No. 9 Cork Street in London until May 23, 2022. The exhibition is a group show of eight Korean and five overseas artists who work in various genres. The gallery has gathered artworks inspired by nature.

Gallery Baton is a gallery that aims to promote acclaimed Korean and international contemporary artists through its curatorial practice that reflects current global art trends. The gallery’s ongoing exhibition at No. 9 Cork Street in London’s gallery district will be an opportunity to introduce Korean contemporary art to a larger audience, along with other international artists.

Hoh Woo Jung (b. 1987)

Hoh Woo Jung collects images of objects from various events occurring in today’s society and interprets them in a different form. Hoh’s paintings show extreme simplicity by only adopting lines and curves of multiple objects. He draws thin lines on a solid background with a pencil and covers the lines with oil paint. Sometimes he sketches the outline of an object and erases the original form by leaving only parts of the outline. 

The remaining geometric figures evoke feelings of instability, urgency, and imbalance to convey emotions such as anxiety, emptiness, and anguish that people today continue to face. But, his paintings, which seemingly extend to an infinite space beyond the canvas, also offer the viewers a consideration of the relationship between an individual and a whole.

Bae Yoon Hwan (b. 1983)

Bae Yoon Hwan’s narrative drawings and paintings draw on his personal experiences, social issues, history, and fables. Bae focuses on the exhausting emotions from overwhelming events, such as anger arousing from social incidents, the boredom that accompanies dragging resolution processes, and personal inner conflicts. He juxtaposes storylines in his artworks but paints without conscious thought, which is the artist’s unique style of figurative automatism painting. The artist creates large-scale paintings and uses different media such as animation to expand his artistic practices.

Bin Woo Hyuk (b. 1981)

Bin Woo Hyuk depicts natural landscapes such as forests, lakes, and parks to create places that evoke peace and relaxation. Inspired by Impressionist paintings, Bin puts together his experiences and memories of different natural landscapes he once visited to create a reinterpreted scene. 

While the paintings are a process of artistic sublimation of the artist’s inner complexity, Bin intends to give a meditative feeling to the viewers by removing narrative elements in the paintings and emphasizing the scenery.

Choi Soo Jung (b. 1977)

Choi Soo Jung adds embroidery to her paintings, which is an expansion of media, in the sense of both the material and the genre. As canvas is made of cloth, the thread used for embroidery is an extension of the canvas, but it is also a part of the image of the painting. It also adds a three-dimensional effect to the flat surface, bringing light and shadow as part of the artwork. The images Choi depicts are psychedelic landscapes that give a somewhat dizzy effect. This is to emphasize the fictionality of the image so that the viewers can recognize that there is a distance from the real world outside the painting. The effect is also a device to hold the viewers longer within the artwork’s fictional space. In this way, the artist examines the relationship between the viewer and the artwork.

Kim Sejin (b. 1971)

Media artist Kim Sejin brings various media apparatuses into her work by touching on subject matters that are difficult to deal with in films or utilizing the film structure to create various stories. Kim unfolds stories that reveal the desires of human beings in contemporary systems or tells stories of the marginalized, such as urban workers or immigrants, in a way that crosses time and space as well as reality and fiction. Kim uses cinematic language and documentary realism in kinetic installations using digital electronic sound.

Artworks by more established Korean artists are presented in the exhibition as well.

Koh San Keum (b. 1966)

The works of Koh San Keum are a process of encoding texts, such as novels, poetry, and law codes. By using artificial pearls, beads, and knitting thread, Koh erases the content of the text by leaving only its visual form. She emphasizes the visual form to reveal the dual characteristics of language: truth and misunderstanding, transparency and opacity, and revelation and secrecy.

Kim Bohie (b. 1952)

Kim Bohie broadens the horizons of landscape painting by combining techniques and materials found in traditional Eastern and Western paintings. The bold yet simple colored surface of Kim’s paintings is drawn through meditatively repeated brushstrokes, which turns the figurative landscapes into an abstract world that reflects the inner self of the artist.

Song Burnsoo (b. 1943)

The works of Song Burnsoo span a variety of genres and mediums, from prints, tapestries, and large-scale site installations. Since his early years as an artist, Song has been expressing his emotions towards the corrupted society and social irrationality through his artistic practices. The images of thorns and their shadows are important symbols in his works that are used to criticize today’s society and reveal the artist’s inner reflection at the same time

Other artists presented in the exhibition include Liam Gillick (b. 1964), Peter Stichbury (b. 1969), Yuichi Hirako (b. 1982), Koen van den Broek (b. 1973), and Max Frisinger (b. 1980).

Located in Mayfair, London, No. 9 Cork Street is a permanent exhibition space run by Frieze, a media and events company that holds five international art fairs around the world. The exhibition space was launched in 2021 to offer leading international art galleries the opportunity to show exhibitions and projects in London’s gallery district. 

References

• Gallery Baton