"Images are swallowed up by a sea of ​​interconnectedness into

a new field of interstices frightening in its appropriateness."

Art Talk: The Early 80s, Jeanne Siegel

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GalleryJJ has prepared an exhibition of Kunwoo Shin and Yunsung Lee with a particular interest in the appropriation and deconstruction of images from the past within the contemporary art scene. This exhibition draws attention to how they craft a network of multifaceted meanings by linking and dismantling traditional and contemporary elements through narratives.

A constant influx of information from multiple sources today accelerates cultural hybridization and languishes dichotomies. According to Roland Barthes, text is created in multiple dimensions, drawn from many cultural values, in which the words of unclear sources jumble and collide. Incorporating reproducible elements from the ancient myths and history in their work positions the existing texts in a new context via appropriation and juxtaposition. This overlap of disparate texts transcending space and time is thus interpreted in many ways due to the mutual intervention among themselves.

Since the 1980s, along with the revival of the figurative discarded by the abstract art, we have seen a more frequent appropriation of images from the past and the media. Nostalgia, which then prevailed in all realms of politics and culture, seemed to borrow much content and many styles from historical heritage. It was often regarded as discontinuous narratives yet related to the contemporaries. Enzo Cucchi (b.1949), an Italian painter, utters that the stories quoting the past prevail because they provide something solid we can cling to in the world full of crises.

Shin blends discrete images that do not conform to the conventional means of storytelling and drives them in an interesting way where paintings and sculptures overlap. Through the images from his experiences and memories, he strolls between the conscious and the unconscious or reality and ideals to solidify them in his multi-dimensional work. The strange scene he crafts without any apparent unity is a testimony to the chaotic modern life and a metaphor for the contradictions in our mundane routines. Lee also refers to utterly different contexts in the Western classics and the contemporary manga on a single canvas where a complex relationship amidst pop culture sentiment and fine art form emerges. He delves into the power and history of the icon itself and depicts it with his unique expression.

This exhibition consists of various media such as painting, relief, and sculpture, and introduces the recent work by Shin and a new Psyche series by Lee. Original and special things can be found by observing the acquainted differently rather than pursuing things entirely distant from the existing. We look forward to awakening our unfamiliar senses and rediscover the overlooked world with the joy of mythical imagination.

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“a new order coming into being, the formation of new oicotypes,

the crystallization of new forms, the reconfiguration of cultures...”

Cultural Hybridity, Peter Burke

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/Testimony

“The enigmatic images in my work exaggerate and distort themselves, and float weightlessly on the already existed but unrecognized narratives.”  - Artist' notes, Gunwoo Shin

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The ambiguous situations in which somewhat recognizable figures and particular incidents tangle in Shin’s work grabs viewers’ attention. Fragmented images and their protrusions through torn gaps are composed of religious and mythical scenes from the Eastern and Western histories. Clashing references and unrelated parts foster a surrealistic atmosphere. He recollects these images floating in his memories, and revisualize them in a contemporary context. It is done to discover the overlooked matters in unconsciousness and the different perceptions among others, and bring them to our awareness. As an artistic fantasy appends at that juncture, any cultural or historical image each pupil is interested in comes to mind and forms their own stories.

To redevelop various historical references, he recalls the icons from Pieta to Oedipus and the Sphinx to Buddhist Four Heavenly Kings, and contemporary artists and his colleagues. These entangled heterogeneous figures from different time and space can form an allegory. It is capable of converting the most certain realism into the most surreal Baroque style. Allegorical icons he delivers from the unconscious imply and replace multiple meanings, and thus lead to multi-layered interpretations. The neglected trivial matters that come to recognition or thee enigmatic images with a faint trace somewhere in our cognition are rendered in his work as a testimony to the unseen presence.

Grotesque describes one’s confusion and tension provoked by facing a world where familiar orders are destroyed, and thus illogical and outlandish. Another expression of this term in the 16th century is sogni dei pittori (painter’s dream). Are painters the ones who endeavor to escape the laws of nature and pursue a surreal world? Or so are all humans? A critic Wolfgang Kayser says it is futile to ponder how much is real or true in this world of experience. Is it a genuine experience or an unconsciously manipulated memory? The figures in his work seem to step out to the real world because of his unique material use and volumetric heaviness, yet they also create a surreal scene due to the static tension from appearing taxidermied. Perhaps the absurd and polysemous scenes thus remind us more of the ambiguous world we are in.

Shin embraces and selects any medium suitable to express his idea without hesitation. He portrays the background of an incident from his memory or its lingering nuances on a flat surface then scrapes the work and redraws repetitively, which leaves multiple layers of that memory. His unique ‘painting-relief’ style has both elements of painting and sculpture apt to articulate the boundaries he aims to express such as the gap between reality and ideals, fact and fiction, and God and human worlds. His work includes a wide range of contemporaneity such as cultural multiplicity, temporal multiplicity, and accelerated world inequality. He speaks of life and existence by juxtaposition and transposition of the images from the past, exposing a small gap that is unnoticed in our world.