akive

Title | CODE _ Pictures of Reincarnation
Period | 18 Sep – 8 Oct, 2012
Venue | Gallery GAHOEDONG60
Support | Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture, Korean Culture and Arts Committee
Website | www.gahoedong60.com
Artist | Kim Kwang Sik, Yoon Yeong Ah, Jung Yong Hoon, Jeong Hae Jin, Cheon Ji Hyeon, Hwang Gyeong Taek

Oepn : Monday to Saturday 12-7pm
Closed on Sundays

Gallery GAHOEDONG60
60, Gahoe-dong, Jongno-gu, Seoul, Korea
www.gahoedong60.com
gahoedong60@gmail.com
+82-2-3673-0585



‘Pictures of Reincarnation’ by DESIGN60

Artist Kim Kwang Sik expressed this exhibition in his note as follows:

“An encounter of animals and plants drawn in old times with those in the present which are different but not different, Pictures of Reincarnation”

Everything of CODE’s Project Exhibition, Pictures of Reincarnation is merged into the above phrase. This exhibition displays works that reinterpret creatures appearing in old paintings by the ancestors in the perspectives of artists who draw eco-paintings. The members of CODE, who are active in various fields and have continued to exhibit eco-paintings since 2010, came up with an interesting idea while planning this exhibition. It was an idea starting from the following questions, “Did creatures appearing in old folk paintings really exist?” and “if so, what were the species and do they exist even now?”
The word, reincarnation assumes a little religious tinge; however, everyone, if not a Buddhist, might have been interested in samsara or reincarnation at least once. This exhibition focuses on animals rather than humans, intending to reincarnate the creatures appearing in the ancestors’ paintings. And yet, reincarnation in this exhibition is not ordinary reincarnation but the environment and life—homonyms pronounced the same; Hwansaeng in Korean. It is reincarnation, but that of the environment and life. This is an external parody of this exhibition.
To reincarnate the creatures, the artists used various techniques such as miniatures using deep-color pigment, Indian ink, watercolor, acrylic paint and colored pencil, and cartoons using a pen. In addition, in terms of the forms of the paintings, the creatures were represented with their own colors, not simply duplicated. The selection of genres and materials, I think, serves as an internal parody of this exhibition. Kim Jeong Hui’s Sehando (A Painting of the Bitter Cold around the Lunar New Year) maximized simple beauty drawing the life of a solitary and elegant classical scholar with a stroke of a brush and Indian ink while Hwang Gyeong Taek shows the relationship between houses and nature humorously and comically in Sehando in Everyday Series.
There are some direct parodies in the form of cartoons; however, other artists borrowed indirect parodies. Jeong Hae Jin drew the transience of wealth and fame freely and splendidly using the question of how to express Morando (A Painting of Peony Blossom) placed in the house to summon wealth and honor in the 21st century in Shin Modando (A New Picture of Peony Blossom) like patterns on the wall paper. Butterflies drawn in the sense of joy symbolizing the coming spring in Nam Gye Wu’s Seokhwajeobdo Daeryeon (A Painting of Stones, Flowers and Butterflies) , which Yoon Yeong Ah replaced by moths often seen around and named it Seokhwaahdo Daeryeon (A Painting of Stones, Flowers and Moths). Although moths do not lack values as a life compared to butterflies, our attitude toward them differs from that toward moths. Is there any law that prohibits moths from being used as a subject of a work! The artist causes the viewers to ask themselves by expressing this in a miniature. Jung Yong Hoon draws Jang Seung Eob’s Hoeungdo (A Picture of The Head Falcon), Cheon Ji Hyeon draws Kim Hong Do’s Hwajodo (A Picture of Flowers and Birds), and Kim Kwang Sik draws Haetamnohwado (A Picture of Crabs holding Reed Flowers) in their own way, and as if they revolted against the ancestors’ minimalism of drawing with a stroke of a brush, they emphasized decorative beauty by expressing in a miniature.
Parodies function as empowering history through the representation of the original copy linking heaviness to lightness: saving the permanence of the original copy. Also, as the parodies are connected and come to have probability, they themselves come to have a structure and are sublimated as a work of art, and if they are expressed as the socio-functional role of art, they sometimes change cultural structures. Prequel movies that can often be encountered in the film world represent this. If an ordinary exhibition develops to one before exhibition or one after exhibition, the techniques used in films can be embodied in the world of art in another aspect. The planner focused on this. I firmly believe that with an intention to make people perceive the narrative structure of art as popular code, these things pile up and retain the diversity of cultural ecosystem.
Representation of the creatures in old paintings: I hope that you will have a lot of interest in and support for CODE’s Exhibition, Pictures of Reincarnation, so that the meeting of the artists who express creatures continues, they add up to artistic values, and they develop themselves while resolving their works by visual amusement.