Kyumin Hwang Solo Exhibition: ㅂㄷ 24. 6. 22. – 7. 26

THEO is pleased to present 'ㅂㄷ', a solo exhibition by Kyumin Hwang, from July 27 to August 23, 2024, at Alterside. This exhibition is an extension of THEO's existing Emerging Artist Support Program. It is supported by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, Korea Arts Management Service as part of the '2024 Emerging Artist Promotion and Marketing Support Project'.

Vandal and Vandalism or Vandalism and Vandal

Vandalism is a word that refers to 'the activity of destroying, defacing, or attempting to deface cultural properties, cultural artworks, religious facilities, and, in a broader sense, other people's property, or defiling them with graffiti', and its dictionary definition means 'the defacement of public objects through intentional or ignorant actions'. This exhibition, "ㅂㄷ”, begins by looking at vandalism from the creator's perspective, and considers the creative process as an act of destroying/becoming.

The artist has been exploring images that can be felt through tactile visualization, or visual imagination through tactile sensation, through atypical flat or three-dimensional works with the main medium of 'tufting' with the theme of 'desire for the unreachable'. In the process, the artist destroys and defiles the raw materials. At the same time, the meaning of the original is also diluted (through deliberate reinterpretation) in the process of image realization, so the act of creation is like a Vandal. If the previous artwork was a process of realizing body sculptures that could create tactile desires as a result of conceptual images, this exhibition is rather a process of expressing desire narratives by deliberately destroying/damaging conceptual images.

In the case of the VD series, it is a continuation of the previous work 'Icon of Beauty (2022)', which used the iconography of 'Venus of Willendorf'. While the previous work, which began as unfounded speculation based on the artist's imagination, was an exploration of the material properties of textiles to trigger tactile desires based on his interpretation and imagination of the unreachable forms of the distant past, the new work is an expression of his desire to conform to the learned absolute 'beauty' standards through the process of deliberately mixing and overlapping the two Venus images of the original, while at the same time leaning on the power of the original to gain ground and authority for his work that he missed in the previous work.

On the other hand, the BD series takes the form and installation method of a pupa metamorphosing into an adult insect, which is an expression of the desire to present a new value of 'beauty' using by-products derived from VD's creative process. BD's materials, derived from VD's creative process, which are intentionally destroyed/damaged, are also part of the raw materials that are not selected for the finished work. BD, which uses the same raw materials but is completed through a completely different process, occupies a clear genre position of three-dimensional or sculpture/installation compared to VD, which has an unclear genre, creating a contradiction that BD partially resolves the deficiencies of VD. In the end, VD and BD form a variety of compatible correlations in the exhibition, as mentioned earlier, and ultimately it is the form and point where the new and old worlds of work are connected through the exhibition.

In the same context, the exhibition and artwork titles, which are composed of destroyed and incomplete words (consisting only of consonants or supersyllables), are ostensibly meaningless symbols, but, depending on the intentions presented, they trigger numerous imaginations and interpretations, which are naturally applied to the work. If it is a kind of regeneration that invites interpretation by acquiring possibilities through the imagination of destroyed/damaged forms that are impossible to interpret, it is similar to the principle of muscle generation that 'regenerates through damage', which in turn resembles the artist's work and even a kind of growth process from pupa to adult. These multiple ambivalent relationships, which can be captured through the exhibition, along with the artist's dual attitude towards 'beauty', allow the viewer to imagine the unknown relationship between the artist and the work in the future, through the inseparable relationship between the action and the actor, such as 'vandal and vandalism or vandalism and vandal', or through various relationships formed through (some) other two entities.

Inspired by fragments of an unknown and distant past, the artist's desire for the unreachable, the unknown bodily sensations that he hopes to share and feel through his work by deliberately destroying it for unclear reasons, is the artist and his work as seen through vandalism.

Kyumin Hwang (b. 1992) was born in Daejeon, South Korea, and focuses on the instinctive five senses that can be felt in screens, spaces, and objects that encourage erotic imagination. By recording and re-sensing the body through the process of visualization and tactilization, Hwang attempts to explore the body that has been sensed against the body that resists it, and the body that is being encroached upon to be sensed. His selected exhibitions are the solo exhibition 'Adultery Mural (2023, Dongyanjang, Daejeon)', the group exhibitions 'Flowers (2023, THEO, Seoul)', 'Don't look at me with those eyes: Bizarre