Kukje Gallery has announced its diverse exhibition plans for 2025, set to take place at its Seoul and Busan locations. Firstly, The gallery’s program will commence with solo exhibitions dedicated to two artists who hold significant positions in the Korean art scene, starting from March 20, 2025.

Seoul's K2 and K3 spaces will present a solo exhibition of the Korean contemporary artist Jae-Eun Choi, who has produced a rich body of works embodying her interest in nature as the source of life since as early as 1986, where she carried out a project involving burying pieces of paper in the ground as a means of materializing communication with the soil. The gallery seeks to address urgent questions concerning the ecosystem through Choi’s work.

The exhibition will highlight Choi’s lyrical landscape of nature comprising paintings based on natural elements of the forest and photographs that record real-time portraits of the sky, as well as the DMZ project that she has developed since 2015. As part of the agenda launched under the title of “Nature Rules,” the project promotes the restoration of the ecosystem within the DMZ based on “DMZ Ecological Forest Plan” produced by Choi. The exhibition plans to offer a closer look into her artistic method undertaken in the project.

Concurrently, in March, the gallery will present a solo exhibition of Ha Chong-Hyun, showcasing his latest works. The exhibition will offer insights into the artistic practice of Ha, whose various experiments with materiality shaped his pictorial grammars that culminated in the artist’s singular method of the “bae-ap-bub” technique. By introducing Ha’s depiction of the field of contemporary painting, the exhibition aims to illuminate his prolific career as an artist who has forged a pioneering path in Korean modern and contemporary art.

In late April, the gallery’s Busan outpost will present Yeondoo Jung’s first solo exhibition in the region, In this exhibition, Jung explores the mischiefs of life, where things do not go as planned and acceptance becomes the only choice, presenting them through his unique perspective.

The artist visualizes ordinary ironies into videos, sculptures, and drawings. The musical expressions and contingency found in the works are linked to the artist’s interpretation of ‘healing’ and ‘yearning,’ as this exhibition once again highlights Jung’s artistic talent of easing weight with lightness.

In June, Kukje Gallery’s K1 and K3 spaces in Seoul will present “Painting after Painting” (working title), a group exhibition of young painters organized by curator Sunghui Lee from HITE Collection. The exhibition addresses how young painters diagnose and explore symptoms of the era, engage with personal narrative and identity, as well as reflect socio-political sensibility in their work vis-à-vis the overflow of images and dismantled boundaries between mediums in contemporary art.

In June, Kukje Gallery presents a group exhibition curated under the theme of “tradition” in its Hanok space. The exhibition groups together the techniques that we had thought were lost in history, the ideologies that have quietly been embedded into contemporary every day, and the tales that have been forgotten. The presentation seeks to be an experimental platform portraying how tradition stays vibrantly alive today at the center of contemporaneity, shed of the layers of cliché that are easily associated with the notion of it.

In fall of 2025, Kukje Gallery's Seoul spaces will be dedicated to the solo exhibition of Louise Bourgeois. Recognized as one of the most influential artists of the past century, Louise Bourgeois worked in various media throughout her 70-year-long career, including drawing, sculpture, painting, printmaking, installation, and performance to produce a highly original vocabulary of forms. Her central themes are the fear of abandonment, sexuality, identity, and the relationship to the Other.

The season will also showcase the gallery’s first exhibition with Gala Porras-Kim. Persistently questioning the system of narrating and interpreting history, Porras-Kim pays attention to how intangible legacies are defined and regulated by artificial layers of contexts. With this exhibition in Korea, Porras-Kim visualizes the arbitrary convention of assigning meaning to nature as a means of seeking to understand and control it.

Kukje Gallery also presents its first exhibition with painter Jang Pa. Frequently introduced as the “female grotesque,” Jang Pa’s work actively subjectifies and visualizes the senses that have historically been Otherized for being categorized as feminine. Her first exhibition with Kukje Gallery will provide the audience a glimpse into the grammar of humor embraced within the women’s bodies and organs painted by Jang Pa, while also narrating the process of how the painter recontextualizes the numerous images and symbols of women that have been employed in various cultures throughout different layers of time and space around the world.

For the final project of the year 2025, Kukje Gallery presents a solo exhibition of Daniel Boyd. Grounded on the research on his own home ground roots, Boyd questions and challenges the preexisting romanticist notions dominated by the Eurocentric narration of history and seeks to restore the perspectives that are overlooked in such hegemonic historical discourse.

His work cultivates a multiplicity of perspectives as the work itself defers any immediate delivery of a singular meaning. Likening the gaps of information that are generated in this process to the notion of darkness, the artist invites the viewers to fill and enlighten the dark void of the unknown with each of our knowledge and different backgrounds, leading the paintings to new horizons of meaning.

References

• 국제갤러리, 2025년 예정 전시 (Kukje Gallery, Forthcoming Exhibitions in 2025)

Ji Yeon Lee has been working as an editor for the media art and culture channel AliceOn since 2021 and worked as an exhibition coordinator at samuso (now Space for Contemporary Art) from 2021 to 2023.