[Gallery Stroll] Seek Those Who Can, With Their Own Senses

Eight Young Artists Gathered by Gallery Hyundai
In an Age of Every Man for Himself, What Can Art Still Save?

Basement of the new building at Gallery Hyundai, Samcheong-ro, Jongno-gu, Seoul. In front of Han Sunwoo’s "Return," the word "return" itself begins to feel strange. The title is "Return," yet the body that has come back does not fit into the home. Inside the ruins of a modern building lies a massive hybrid body, with barnacles attached to its back—symbols of a long journey. The building, invaded by plants, suggests that the home to which one returns is no longer the home it used to be. The severed feet evoke not arrival, but exile. In front of this work, the exhibition title "Seek Those Who Can" sounds less like a catchy name for a young artists’ show and more like a command to survive. Those who can survive, should survive. Then, who is this exhibition trying to save? The artist, the senses, or perhaps the order of the art world, which is once again being reorganized under the name "next generation"?

Exhibition "Seek Those Who Can," panoramic image of "Women in Abstraction, the Language of Sensation," Gallery Hyundai

The exhibition title is taken from a film by Jean-Luc Godard. The French phrase "Sauve qui peut" is closer to evacuation than hope. It means "Every man for himself." Gallery Hyundai borrowed this harsh phrase to bring together eight artists born after the 1980s. Migration, female abstraction, digital imagery, traditional Korean painting, queer identity, and post-AI painting all converge under one roof. At first glance, it appears to represent the diversity of contemporary art. Yet, diversity has already become the safest word in the art world. The real issue is not how different these artists are, but how much their differences can uncomfortably unsettle each other.

The exhibition does not push this discomfort to its limits. The first floor is themed "Migration, Gaps, and Floating," the second floor is "Female Abstraction, Language of Sensation," and the basement is "The Refusing Subject." The divisions are considerate; visitors never lose their way. However, this very consideration clashes with the title. "Seek Those Who Can" is a phrase that emerges after order collapses, yet within the exhibition space, the artists are too neatly organized. Migrating artists are on the first floor, female abstraction on the second, and refusing subjects in the basement. Still, this sense of stability is not necessarily meaningless. In fact, because the classification is so clear, the force with which the works push against those classifications becomes even more apparent. This exhibition has brought together excellent artists. More important moments occur when these artists subtly slip out of the labels the exhibition has prepared for them.

'He Who Can, Save' Exhibition, 'The Refusing Subject' Exterior Image, Gallery Hyundai

This is the case with Han Sunwoo’s "Return." His process—reassembling images collected online with Photoshop and AI, then translating them back into oil paint—rewinds the speed of digital imagery into the slower time of the hand. The hybrid body in ruins is neither human nor animal, neither nature nor machine. The title "Return" may sound warm, but the image is cold. The one who returns does not fit the home, and the home is no longer a place that would accept him. Survivors do not return unscathed. Survival leaves traces, and those traces transform the body.

Lee Hyein’s "Rosa" poses the same question from the opposite perspective. If Han Sunwoo’s body is a being that has returned through ruins, Lee Hyein’s rose is a being that carries the time of blooming and withering within itself. The red, blue, and white brushstrokes capture not the form of a flower, but the very moment when full bloom and fading occur simultaneously. "Rosa" is both a rose and the baptismal name of the artist’s mother. The flower is both a plant’s name and a family memory, the peak of a season and a premonition of a life about to disappear. If the "essence" discussed in the exhibition were a grand aesthetic proclamation, it would have felt empty. Lee Hyein’s painting grounds that idea in the memory of the body and the pressure of time.

Sunwoo Han, Return Home. 2026. Gallery Hyundai

The works of Jung Jinhwa and Cho Isop make us question the safe signposts of the exhibition even more directly. Jung Jinhwa’s ink paintings do not clearly define their subjects. Between blurring and shading, the forms of people, flowers, and sheep are more prone to disappearance than emergence. The windows of the white structures make us gaze at the unattainable, while "Sheep on the Table" and "Person Draped in White Cloth" push images of sacrifice and wounds into the lingering light, rather than scenes of suffering. Cho Isop is even more irreverent. He inscribes "REST IN POOP" onto a tombstone-shaped "R.I.P." and deconstructs recorders and flutes to create "Unplaying." The instruments are no longer played, and the tombstone is no longer sacred. The moment objects that have lost their function become sculptures, identity slips away from any clear signpost.

For this reason, "Seek Those Who Can" should be seen less as a successful young artists’ exhibition and more as a tension between successful categorization and the works that resist those categories. The market demands names, galleries group artists by generation, and platforms accelerate image consumption. Within this, artists acquire names like migrant, woman, queer, AI, Korean painting, or abstraction. Names are necessary, but they also become fences. The exhibition finds its strength not in explaining those fences, but in the moments when certain works move more slowly and persistently than the fences themselves.

Seek those who can. It is a harsh phrase. Yet, in this exhibition, it feels less like a command to survive and more like a call not to delegate one’s own senses to others. It is difficult to claim that art can save the world. Such statements are too grand and quickly become outdated. However, if there is anything left that art can still save, it may be the sense that operates before the world assigns a name, the body before classification, the discomfort before explanation. This exhibition does not fully liberate that sense. But a few works, even within the organized exhibition space, still breathe untamed. The exhibition runs until July 26.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.