ㅇ-ㅇ-ㅇ: Yu Se Eun, Yoo Booza, An Jueun
From November 4 to 23, 2023, Gallery Chosun will present a group exhibition titled 《ㅇ-ㅇ-ㅇ》, featuring artist An Jueun(안주은), Yoo Booza(유부자), and Yu Se Eun(유세은). The exhibition title, drawn from the initials of the three artists’ names, metaphorically reflects their practice of weaving together man-made objects, natural forms, and images.
Ahn Jueun paints imagined scenes combining human-made structures with natural elements. Yoo Booza creates works; both objects and paintings, using natural materials along with frames, canvases, and other supports. Yoo Se Eun produces paintings that recombine images generated in digital environments.
Despite this, each of the three artists approaches their materials in very different ways.
Ahn Jueun gives human-made structures new forms and roles, replacing their original purpose and function. These structures can appear as obstacles that hinder the growth of plants in her paintings, or they might be seen as companions that project, interact with, and support one another. Ahn creates her paintings with admiration and encouragement for all these elements.
Yoo Booza takes a more ritualistic approach, exploring her fate and the “ultimate self” through the natural materials and paintings she handles. She carves stones into divine shapes, uses decorative frames as gateways to capture the otherworldly, and creates paintings that function like talismans with spiritual efficacy.
Yoo Se Eun experiments with the ecology of digital images through painting. She collects images and recomposes them on canvas, stripping them of their original meaning and context. Her work emphasizes this “loss of meaning” through images she calls “MacGuffins”, “artifacts,” and “clichés”. This sense of absence reflects not only the world of digital images but also her own sensory experience of the world.
At the same time, the exhibition title 《ㅇ-ㅇ-ㅇ》 can be seen from another perspective, as tracing a path from one step to the next, and then the step after that. The three artists recently graduated around the same time from the same school and department. In Korea, an artist’s growth typically follows a path from undergraduate studies, to graduate school, to solo exhibitions, and then onward.
All three have chosen not to continue to graduate school and are facing “reality” directly. They may be navigating feelings of both anxiety and hope about the unknown future, as well as simultaneous confidence and doubt about their work. While we cannot know what comes next for them, unlike their aligned undergraduate paths, the trajectories they will now follow are likely to diverge. Let us watch and support the paths they are about to take.