Speeding into the future, full throttle, firing on all cylinders – what if you stop and think about what’s been left behind?
This is the predicament for the contemporary artists of South Korea, a nation that has rocketed from rural economy to technological powerhouse in the space of only a few years. Living through seismic geographical and social changes, they have been forced to hit the ground running in the brave new globalised world. To take stock of how this progress affects and shapes contemporary Korean culture, ‘Ideal Worlds’ brings together the work of three exciting emerging artists: Koh Sang Woo, Luca Sangjun Kim, and Gee Song.
Koh Sang Woo’s vibrant photographs explore an idealised version of pure love, uncorrupted by power or greed. Working with real couples to document their relationships, he paints onto their bodies before taking their portraits as part of a theatrical performance. By reversing the colour and light in the exposure, he gives his photographs an unmistakeable visual electricity and intense emotional charge – hyper-real romance for the IT age. Koh Sang Woo has exhibited at Christies and the Armory in New York, and SUN Contemporary in Seoul. This is his first UK exhibition.
Luca Sangjun Kim’s paintings are a process of sedimentation, reduction and renewal. Into compositions of natural phenomena – a horizon line, the sun’s disc – he pours “skins” of brightly-coloured paint, working into each wet layer with one intense gesture so that each one evolves by human intervention, much like the landscape itself. The edges are left clean, like a geological cut in the painting, while the centres glow vividly as an idealised space where artist and nature meet. Luca Sangjun Kim has exhibited at the Jerwood Space in London as well as throughout South Korea.
Gee Song’s paintings are like stereotypical snapshots of holiday paradises – a tropical beach, diving in a coral reef, or a sunset above a jungle canopy – with bold, lush colours enhancing their allure. But beneath the innocent idealisation, the paintings underline how these are just ideas, dreams, and how, the more we live removed from the natural world, the more nature itself becomes an idealised, packaged product – an “other” to be consumed in our increasingly complex relationship with our environment. Gee Song is a South Korean painter and recent MFA graduate from Goldsmiths.
Each artist grapples with issues of rapid change over the past decades in their native land, and how this has altered traditional relationships to the land and to each other. Each has their own way of examining and resolving the beauty of an ideal with the stark realities they find in contemporary society. Together, Ideal Worlds gives a timely insight into the cultural dynamics of one of the world’s most exciting ascendant economies.
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Cookie | Type | Duration | Description |
---|---|---|---|
_wpfuuid | 1 | This cookie is used by the WPForms WordPress plugin. The cookie is used to allows the paid version of the plugin to connect entries by the same user and is used for some additional features like the Form Abandonment addon. | |
cookielawinfo-checkbox-necessary | 0 | 11 months | This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary". |
cookielawinfo-checkbox-non-necessary | 0 | 11 months | This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Non Necessary". |
viewed_cookie_policy | 0 | 11 months | The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. It does not store any personal data. |
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
Cookie | Type | Duration | Description |
---|---|---|---|
test_cookie | 0 | 11 months | This cookie is set by doubleclick.net. The purpose of the cookie is to determine if the users' browser supports cookies. |
Cookie | Type | Duration | Description |
---|---|---|---|
CONSENT | 0 | 16 years 10 months 14 days 16 hours 18 minutes | No description |
Advertisement cookies help us provide our visitors with relevant ads and marketing campaigns.
Cookie | Type | Duration | Description |
---|---|---|---|
IDE | 1 | 1 year 24 days | Used by Google DoubleClick and stores information about how the user uses the website and any other advertisement before visiting the website. This is used to present users with ads that are relevant to them according to the user profile. |
VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE | 1 | 5 months 27 days | This cookie is set by Youtube. Used to track the information of the embedded YouTube videos on a website. |
Analytics cookies help us understand how our visitors interact with the website. It helps us understand the number of visitors, where the visitors are coming from, and the pages they navigate. The cookies collect this data and are reported anonymously.
Cookie | Type | Duration | Description |
---|---|---|---|
YSC | 1 | session | This cookies is set by Youtube and is used to track the views of embedded videos. |