Gallery 526, through November 5
A focus on temporality and presence
Gallery 526 is presenting <Before It Dries: Wet Layers> by artists Kim Yu-jeong and Lee Jin-young through November 5. This two-person exhibition draws attention to the temporality and presence of the process of creating a complete form within an unfinished, imperfect state, suggesting that as much as the result, the ceaseless challenge and the sincere act of making itself carry important meaning.
Kim Yu-jeong borrows the traditional fresco technique and reinterprets it in a contemporary way through scratch-based expression, presenting a distinctive visual surface all her own. Using a carving tool, the artist creates roughly rendered incised lines that serve as metaphors for inner wounds and scars. By confronting these wounds directly as a process of overcoming them, she sublimates the act itself into a ‘tool of healing,’ leaving open the possibility of communication.
In this exhibition, the artist reveals the relationship of dominance between plants and humans—one of her central themes—and the socialization of plant life, projecting reflections on artificial nature and the image of the individual within society that can be glimpsed therein. Plants landscaped to appear natural offer comfort to people in the city or shape the environment. Through this image of nature transplanted into the human domain, she offers viewers a new perspective.
Lee Jin-young grounds her practice in the medium of photography, expanding its possibilities through diverse experimentation. Working through the wet-plate photographic process known as the ambrotype—invented in 1851, in which a light-sensitive emulsion is applied to a glass plate and the image is shot and developed before it dries—she does not simply reproduce the scenery she observes, but instead infuses her work with the contingency and inevitability generated by the emergence of a latent abstract impulse. Negotiating between figurative and abstract imagery and crossing the boundaries of reality and imagination, photography and painting, the artist creates soft, dreamlike images.
In this exhibition, she also takes natural scenery—clouds, sky, plants—as her subject matter, expressing it faintly and ambiguously through numerous processes. Using materials such as silk noile and transparent mesh to present photographs that capture nature’s light and atmosphere through the ambrotype method, she offers newly expanded experiments concerning an organic space that, though indistinct in its boundaries, is imbued with vitality, drawing out a delicate sensibility in those who view it.