Cultivating Corea III

August 03 - September 13, 2024 Opening Reception: Saturday, August 03, 3-6 PM

Scott&Jae Gallery of Beverly Hills is pleased to present Cultivating Corea III, a group exhibition celebrating the gallery’s third anniversary. This show which features six artists from Korea—JEONG HyunSook (정현숙), JUNG YoungMo (정영모), KANG ShinDuk (강신덕), KIM GyeHwan (김계환), KOO ChaSoong (구자승) and LIM HyunJu (임현주)—and reaffirms Scott&Jae’s commitment to showcasing exciting new currents in Korean art.

Cultivating Corea III will be on view at 215 S. La Cienega Blvd. Suite 210 from August 03 through September 13, 2024; an opening reception for the show will take place on Saturday August 3, 2024 from 3-6 PM.

Cultivating Corea III invites six Korean artists to engage with the question, “what is the role of representational art?”

For three of the artists, the answer lies in the evocative qualities of mimesis. To that end, Jung Youngmo’s richly textured pointillistic paintings of colorful landscapes and playful animals seek to capture the bittersweet nostalgia for the innocence of childhood. Similarly, Lim HyunJoo’s storybook-like works featuring whimsical pastel-toned houses explore the notion of home and the warm feelings of comfort and safety it elicits. While Jung and Lim’s works are connotative, with the emotional impact of their art reliant on the sentimental associations attached to the subject depicted, the gauzy atmospheric paintings of Kim GyeHwan are more directly affective; his neo-impressionistic landscapes and still-lifes eschew semiotics and instead seek to recreate the sensory impressions of nature.

As for the other three artists, the long history of representational art in both the East and West provide a space for discourse. Koo ChaSoong, one of the pioneering figures of Korea’s Hyperrealism movement of the 70s and 80s, began painting his photo-realistic still-lifes in part as a critique of the preceding era’s monochrome abstractions that he found too impersonal. On the other hand, Jeong HyunSook draws from the rich history of decorative arts in Korea, notably the art of inlaying mother-of-pearl, to create iridescent paintings that recontextualize traditional imagery and practices for a modern global audience. And still yet, Kang ShinDuk makes still-life prints that use lenticular technology to create an illusion of depth, thereby bringing dimensionality to a genre that had heretofore been confined to a flat surface. Contemporary representational art from Korea has not yet gained the wide-spread appreciation from the international art world as its abstract counterpart. While a comprehensive survey is beyond the purview of a single gallery exhibition, Cultivating Corea III seeks to shed light on the current directions in Korean representation art.

Chun Kwang Young, Aggregation 22-AP097, Mixed media with hanji paper, 2022