[This Week's Exhibitions] Woo Byungyoon Solo Exhibition, "Superposition: Floating Landscape" | Kim Kangyong Solo Exhibition, "KIM KANG YONG: REALITY IMAGE" and More

Editor's NoteThis weekly exhibition guide introduces a selection of diverse and compelling exhibitions from across the country that visitors can enjoy over the coming week.

Woo Byeongyun’s *Floating Landscape 26-09-329*. The work repeatedly scrapes away the flat plaster ground to reveal white lines, using their density to create the contours of mountains and a sense of space. Seon Gallery.

Woo Byungyoon Solo Exhibition, "Superposition: Floating Landscape"

The landscape emerges from the places that have been scraped away, rather than from paint applied to the surface. Woo Byungyoon does not use nature as a backdrop onto which he projects his emotions or memories. His work begins with the idea that the world continues independently of the human gaze, and that humans, too, are only momentarily part of it. This exhibition, his first solo show at Seon Gallery, features 32 paintings, including works from his existing "Superposition" series and new works that extend it, titled "Floating Landscape." Visitors can see together how his exploration of material surfaces has shifted toward landscapes with the contours of mountains and a sense of space.

Woo Byung-yoon's "Superposition 26-01-301." The work features lines created by stacking plaster, painting the surface, and scraping it back, moving between waves, mountains, and the grain of the material. Sun Gallery

The "Superposition" series is made by applying plaster to wooden panels to create a textured surface, painting it, and then scraping it away. For his new works, Woo paints a flat plaster surface and repeatedly scrapes it in one direction to expose the white plaster beneath. The contours and volume of mountains emerge not as more color is added, but as it is removed. Regular horizontal and vertical lines cross the surface, flattening the depth that has just been created. The "floating" in the exhibition title, then, refers less to being suspended in the air than to a state that does not settle completely on either side of nature and humanity, abstraction and landscape, or flatness and depth. On view through November 3 at Seon Gallery in Jongno-gu, Seoul.

Yangha’s “A Very Tiny Event_2.” Leaving traces of events between forms that divide inside from outside, such as doors and windows, the work invites us to imagine both what has already passed and scenes yet to come. FIM

Yang Ha Solo Exhibition, "Over there"

A letter becomes part of someone's past the moment it arrives. Yang Ha, who works between Amsterdam and Seoul, focuses in this solo exhibition on "movement," "borders," and the "messages" that are conveyed. When something that has set out from afar arrives in a different place and time, its meaning can no longer be the same as it was at the outset. In the artist's paintings, familiar objects and scenes gradually shift away from their original contexts, while forms that divide inside and outside, such as doors, arches, and windows, invite viewers to imagine another scene beyond the canvas. Rather than showing events directly, Yang leaves behind traces of figures who have disappeared and their surroundings, creating a tension as if what has already happened and what has yet to happen overlap on a single canvas.

Yangha's "A Very Tiny Event_8." By shifting familiar objects and landscapes away from their original contexts, it captures the moment an image moves and is reinterpreted. FIM

In this exhibition, movement is also traced through the histories of actual materials. Waterproof tarpaulins and securing straps used to transport industrial machinery from Changwon, South Korea, to Arnhem, the Netherlands, are transformed into sculptural columns in the gallery. The dust and marks accumulated over months of transport, along with the actual shipping invoices, are left intact, while the artist adds motifs she has repeatedly used, embroidered onto the materials. On one side are records of objects in transit; on the other, the time taken by images to travel. What once divided spaces becomes, through movement, a device that unsettles their boundaries; what was over there arrives here and is reinterpreted. The exhibition invites visitors to read more than 20 paintings and installations as a single "letter that crossed the sea." On view through November 14 at FIM in Yongsan-gu, Seoul.

Kim Kangyong's "Reality+Image 2511-2619." The work reduces the form of bricks to cubes and uses repeated colors and shadows to create depth on a flat surface, making it look like real space. Pyo Gallery.

Kim Kang-yong Solo Exhibition, "KIM KANG YONG: REALITY IMAGE"

The more bricks disappear, the more Kim Kang-yong's paintings reveal. Known as a "brick artist" for nearly half a century, he turned his attention in the 1970s to bricks, anonymous units mass-produced amid industrialization and urban development. The repetition of identically shaped bricks to form buildings and cities served as a means of exploring the relationship between individuals and groups, and between existence and anonymity. Rather than focusing on how precisely he has painted the bricks, this exhibition traces how, after years of repetition, his gaze has shifted to the gaps and empty spaces between them, and to light and shadow.

Kim Kang-yong's "Reality+Image 2511-2597." Two cubes and their shadows are all that remain on a blue field, revealing a gaze wavering between reality and image, plane and space. Pyo Gallery

In his recent works, even the form of the brick has been simplified into a cube, and the empty spaces between the cubes have grown wider. Made by mixing actual sand with paint, the surfaces appear rough and flat up close, but from a few steps away create a sense of depth, as if the cubes were jutting out or receding into the surface. Reality and image, flatness and space, are reversed depending on the viewing distance. A question that once began with bricks in the real world has now shifted to: "What are we seeing, and why do we believe it is real?" What ultimately remains where the bricks have been erased is not the image, but the gaze that looks at it. On view through October 31 at PYO Gallery in Jongno-gu, Seoul.

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