Beyond Issue: Kim Hyun Jung, Yongseok Oh
In a complex social life, art deals with recreating, in a visual way, the illusions and myths that shape civilisation. As grand ideas fall apart and we return to ordinary life, it helps to examine everyday routines. Now, this ordinary life itself has become the issue.
Problems appear when something goes wrong in daily life, when we face hardship or disappointment. In such moments, stories begin. We are pushed to create something new. Because the root of desire is the same for everyone, our minds are filled more with others than with ourselves. Desire may be limited by reality but it cannot be forced. From it, we draw out the highest form that cannot be controlled. The artwork that comes from this is both a way to communicate and a deeply personal expression. Its subjectivity creates ambiguity, allowing different readings. This makes the work more than simple communication.
This exhibition looks beyond the artist’s personal or social issues through images shaped by past experiences and personal imagination. The artist awakens, rebuilds the world, sometimes struggles with it in a sensual way, and at times embraces it. This appears in specific elements such as unfamiliar scenes, new spaces, and special places. These images create subtle hints between the ordinary and the imagined, inviting unusual interpretations. Images are dreams of the world, and dreams are rarely simple or clear. They are both leftovers and additions. They hide and reveal at the same time.
Kim Hyun Jung captures everyday scenes that we can easily recognise because they follow familiar ways of seeing. Yet these very concrete scenes are deeply filled with sorrow. They contain rich stories that seem purified through an intense, almost biological response to sadness.
When nature becomes something we cannot clearly understand, painting seems to move away from reality. Yet beyond this tension, there is an inner act of reflection based on lived experience. Through it, the artist longs for an essential world, not just one of appearances but one shaped by direct experience and attachment. By thinking deeply and expressing these reflections, we move from isolation toward connection. We can overcome the emptiness of the visible world and imagine our own true worlds.
Yongseok Oh begins with images taken from reality. In any society, certain events and incidents are hard to accept. They remain unresolved problems. They may be hidden in the darker corners of society, yet at the same time spread through the media as one of the most shocking issues of the day.
The quiet and peaceful landscapes in his work may seem abstract. He extracts and solidifies scenes from real sites because he wants to make visible a reality we know exists. This world is marked as something unknown and hard to grasp. It points to something, but the time within the combined images feels vague. His method is suggestive. The unclear world he shows can seem cruel, yet it can also appear full of life.
Today we realise that what seems ordinary in the media is often virtual and illusory. The image seeks to recover the original face of everyday life. In Oh’s work, what looks obvious is turned upside down. By revealing his subjects, he shows both pain and the causes of pain through images shaped by our awareness. What we sense then are signs of substance, signals that something real exists.