Jina Park
Human Lights / Jina Park
Aug 6 - Sep 12, 2021
Kukje Gallery
Busan, South Korea

Kukje Gallery is pleased to announce Human Lights, a solo exhibition of the Korean contemporary painter Jina Park. Park employs snapshots to capture scenes of the everyday and translates them onto the canvas as paintings. Portraying the colorful expressions of exhibition installation sites, performance rehearsals, and nighttime sceneries, the platform of paintings allows the audience to look back on the otherwise unnoticed or forgotten mundane life anew. The artist’s first exhibition with the gallery, Human Lights, presents works that demonstrate Park’s experimentations of her painterly perspective on everyday scenes that she has captured using the camera as her assisting tool.

While the show is composed mainly of new works, its narrative begins with an exceptionally earlier work titled Moontan 04 (2007). The Moontan series is a group of paintings portraying nocturnal picnics that had one day started with a friend’s proposal to “go bathe in the moonlight” in a park. Although it is a landscape of basking in the moon, the effect of the camera’s flashlight is much more evident on the canvas than that of the natural moonlight. In the scene captured with the bright flash of the camera, the figures seem much more two-dimensional and acute than in real life. The represented scene appears dramatic, as if being presented by actors on a dark theater stage. As the gaze of the audience follows the actors’ movements into the nocturnal picnic scene, it eventually trails onto the flat sky serving as the backdrop of the stage, the color plane constructed by layers of overlapping brushstrokes. As such, it is through the effects of the camera and artificial light that the artist breaks free of the constraints of representation and seeks new directions for painterly expressions.

OTHER ANNOUNCEMENTS & EVENTS
  • 1 a 1 Affinità
    Nov 22, 2023 – Feb 29, 2024
    ON House Milano
    Milan, Italy

    1 a 1 Affinità is a group show celebrating the relationship between different artistic expressions and their surrounding context. The exhibition takes place at ON House Milano: a charming location in the heart of Milano, which used to be the Azucena workshop of Architect Caccia Dominioni.

    The combination of space, artwork, and the artworks between them invites the audience to discover, through research and observation, that “spark” of affinity generated by perception.

    The path follows the thin line that defines different artistic languages, such as figurative art and abstract art, but also performance, photography, NFT, happening, video and installation. And everything with the utmost respect to the historical heritage and design purpose of the house.

    This was, in fact, the toughest challenge for the curators Anna Kessler and Anna Niutta. They looked for the harmony within different poetics, and created a unique and unexpected domestic experience. An experience deeply related to the visible.

    Starting from the “Sleeping Girl” (yes, she will be actually sleeping in the bedroom of the house), the exhibition reveals a path through memories and people, mysteries and objects and colors and hopes. And in fact, isn’t the bed the one, true realm of imagery and imagination, dreams and visualizations?

    Every night, as we lay our day down, we practice the art of letting go. We leave our conscious thoughts, our rational mind behind, and we agree to see, and be seen  –  we accept to yield control. And as we do that, we gift ourselves to the domain of imagery  –  key and vehicle to those intimate, submerged places and spaces. At night, it is instinct and imagery that guide our experience.

    Research on the visible is a challenge to observation directed to the observer. There certainly is a real world that we know, but how much of this real world is exhausted in our sensory experience?

    Through the dialogue between works, the observer discovers similarities between different languages that ultimately prove to be distant only in appearance. Different artistic means manage to generate, through perception, a living impression in continuous dialogue with the observer.

    The common features, or affinities, between the different forms of expression appear very clear at times: the figurative often finds itself drawing from elements that are not properly its own, and the non-figurative struggles to disregard sensory reality that is also perhaps only an illusion.

    To what degree is our sensory perception conditioned by our inner state and to what extent is it – instead – influenced by our surroundings?

    The show will be featuring the following artists: Michele Dal Bosco, Louise Daniel, Giovanni De Benedetto, Laura Grinberga, Alessandro Grimoldieu, Rosanna Iob, Rebecca Loro, Guenda Nocentini, Carolina Pozzi, Maddalena Tesser, Maria Giovanna Zanella. With the precious contribution of Annalisa Iob. Everything was made possible by the vision of Fabio Tacchinardi.

    Curated by Anna & Anna
    On House Milano, Via Passione 8, Milan, Italy
    Vernissage by invitation only
    For more information: art@onhousemilano.com

  • Nonmemory
    Sep 15, 2023 – Jan 14, 2024
    Hauser & Wirth
    Los Angeles, USA

    Through a variety of media and material, the artists in this exhibition use space as the repository for dreams, fantasies, traumas and anxieties, while offering opportunities to re-imagine and recreate reality. The title of the exhibition Nonmemory, takes direct inspiration from Kelley’s use of the term, a way of treating, reordering and representing the complex and unstable relationship between memory, space and identity. (more…)