[This Week's Exhibitions] Usunok Woo Retrospective 'Art Is Already in Your Heart', Youngheon Kim Solo Exhibition 'Proxima', and More

Editor's NoteThis week's exhibition roundup introduces a selection of diverse and captivating shows taking place across the country, highlighting those you can enjoy throughout the week.

Kwon Kisu's 'My Favorites-a Red Boat' is a work that depicts a landscape of a modern utopia through the character ‘Dongguri’ swimming between the blank space and color plane of a landscape painting. Gallery Mari

Group Exhibition by Kwon Kisu, Lee Donggi, Hong Kyungtaek, and Hong Wonpyo: 'AFTER IMAGES'

Images no longer remain fixed in one place. The group exhibition 'AFTER IMAGES' featuring Kwon Kisu, Lee Donggi, Hong Kyungtaek, and Hong Wonpyo, examines the contemporary cultural landscape—a mix of virtual and real, tradition and popular culture, material desire and intellectual reflection—through four distinct perspectives. While Lee Donggi's 'Atomaus' reveals the hybrid persona of media society, Hong Kyungtaek's canvases persistently confront the excesses of consumerism, densely packed with ballpoint pens, books, and everyday objects. Kwon Kisu's 'Dongguri' roams between the white space and color fields of landscape painting, seeking a lost inner tranquility, and Hong Wonpyo's 'Barababba' uses unbroken lines to connect everyday life and art, artist and audience.

Lee Donggi's "Immortal Riding a Cloud" reveals the hybrid sensibility of the media age through a screen where popular characters and abstract images collide. Gallery Mari

The exhibition unfolds sensations of desire and lack, alienation and solidarity—qualities of our present era—through compositions where characters, patterns, colors, and lines intersect. Though the work of each artist extends in a different direction, they ultimately engage with a central question: how do we contemplate the cultural terrain of our time? Iconic images are not consumed superficially; instead, they become a painterly language that records today's sensibilities. The exhibition runs through October 9 at Gallery Mari in Jongno-gu, Seoul.

Soo-nok Woo's "A Very Small House." This installation places 108 everyday objects and light on a grid to unfold the memories and time embedded in the objects into a single landscape. Sungkok Art Museum

Usunok Woo Retrospective: 'Art Is Already in Your Heart'

Art is not an external grand declaration, but something that can be found in the long contemplation of objects and the traces of time gone by. The retrospective 'Art Is Already in Your Heart' at Sungkok Art Museum surveys the world of conceptual art that Usunok Woo, who passed away in 2023, constructed from her earliest works in the 1980s through to the last days of her life. Woo has persistently explored questions of existence and perception, memory and place, through painting, drawing, installation, and video. In her work, the visible and invisible, material and immaterial, creation and extinction become not antagonistic concepts, but interconnected relationships that pass through and merge with each other.

U Soonok's 'Flag (Lonely Pride)'. This early work reflects on time and memory beyond what appears to be thick paper and charcoal and pigment powder. Sungkok Art Museum

Pencil and pastel marks on paper or raw canvas, rusted steel plates, smoke, plants, and everyday objects like old desks and chairs serve as conduits for the artist to sense memory and time. The 'Room' evokes a sense of private space through visitors' bodily engagement as they walk between black cloths, and her 'Smoke Drawing' transforms the fleeting moment of a water droplet vanishing on hot metal into a drawing of time. The exhibition suggests a space for contemplation within silence and emptiness, in an era where images are rapidly consumed. The show runs through October 3 at Sungkok Art Museum in Jongno-gu, Seoul.

Younghun Kim's 'p26006-Electronic Nostalgia'. This work transfers the images of electronic noise and waves into the material texture of painting, overlapping digital sensation with analog longing. Gallery JJ

Solo Exhibition by Younghun Kim: 'Proxima'

Invisible waves appear on the canvas as rhythms of color and line. The solo exhibition 'Proxima' by Younghun Kim is staged at the crossroads of the electronic world and the materiality of painting, where digital noise and analog longing intersect. Through unique ripple patterns and colors, the artist has translated the shifting sensations and perceptions amid the transformation of contemporary scientific civilization into painting. This show presents more than 20 works, including the expanded 'Frequency' series and new pieces from the signature series 'Electronic Nostalgia' produced since 2009.

'P25014-Electronic Nostalgia' by Youngheon Kim. The layers of color fields and undulating lines evoke both an imaginary landscape and musical abstraction. Gallery JJ

Layers, stains, scratches, and vibrating lines and surfaces create a sense of continuity and discontinuity on the canvas, evoking virtual landscapes or musical abstraction. While the 'Frequency' series composes rhythms through the order of waves and varying thickness of paint, 'Electronic Nostalgia' conjures memories and longing through electronic landscapes dispersed with pixels and noise. The exhibition title 'Proxima' comes from the name of the closest star to the solar system. Like this nearest neighboring star, which remains unreachable despite its proximity, Younghun Kim’s paintings overlay the microscopic with the cosmic, and blend the starlight of the past with present-day sensations on a single canvas. The exhibition runs through October 3 at Gallery JJ in Gangnam-gu, Seoul.

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