The Korean Cultural Center Washington, D.C. proudly presents Breaking Boundaries, a new group exhibition featuring abstract installations, paintings and sculptures by four contemporary Korean artists whose work transcends the traditional boundaries—mental, physical, spatial—that define human life and how we experience it. Yunkyung Kim, Jisook Kim, Hyo Jin Yook, and Kwang Bum Jang each express contradictory phenomena in their art and subvert familiar concepts such as life and death, time and space, or real and ideal by combining a variety techniques and media.

 

Admission to the opening reception featuring talks by the artists on Friday, April 5 at 6:00 p.m. is free and open to the public, but registration is required (below). Breaking Boundaries will remain on view during regular hours through April 26, 2019.

 

WHAT: Art exhibition, artist talks, & public opening reception

WHO: Yunkyung Kim, Jisook Kim, Hyo Jin Yook, Kwang Bum Jang

WHEN: Opening Reception: Friday, April 5 at 6:00 p.m.

On View: April 5 – 26, 2019 (open M-F, 9am-noon & 1:30-5:30 pm)

WHERE: Korean Cultural Center Washington, D.C. (2370 Massachusetts Ave. NW)

HOW: 

 

Yunkyung Kim creates beautiful yet fatal abstract images visually reminiscent of a virus, through repetition and careful arrangement. Her Viruscape (virus+scape) series, displayed in a door or window frame, evokes the microscopic origins of both life and death, but the virus-like imagery seen through a passageway is also a metaphor for the complex and often absurd landscape of modern society. 

 

Yunkyung Kim received her BFA and MFA in Sculpture from Ewha Woman's University in Korea. She also received her MFA in Art Practice from Goldsmiths University of London in the UK and completed her Ph.D. in Sculpture from Hongik University in Korea. She is the recipient of various grants and prizes including the 2017 Prix Whanki Competition from the Whanki Museum, from the 2016 Kim Chong Yung Museum, 2008 Finalist for the Taiwan International Video Art Festival, and selected artist of the Kohler Asia Art Program. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, including at Whanki Museum and Young-eun Museum of Contemporary Art in Korea, at the Hong Kong Arts Centre in Hong Kong, Goodman Arts Centre in Singapore, and Sassoon Gallery in London.

 

Jisook Kim conveys a delicate coexistence of life, energy, and time in her artwork, using a marbling technique that embeds variating drawn lines throughout her multidimensional installations. These abstract and simplified patterns reflect the energy of the natural world in an artificial yet organic shape, existing in an ambiguous state just like the boundaries between reality and our ideals, or human life and the wider universe.

 

Jisook Kim received her BFA and MFA in Sculpture from Sungshin Woman's University in Korea. After moving to the United States, she completed residency programs at ARPNY and 4heads Artist in Residence Program. She was selected for Diamond District Windows by ChaShaMa and the Governors Island Art Fair in 2018, and has participated numerous exhibitions including Built Emotions at Gallery Sensei, Memory of Emotions at Hutchins Gallery, With Something at K&P Gallery in New York, and at Jersey City Hall. For more information, visit www.Artistjisookkim.com. 

 

Mixed media, 2016

Hyo Jin Yook questions the hierarchy and structure that defines the nature of human life in a capitalist era, using windows as her main motif in her evocative installations. Based on her experience living in a small single room in shared urban housing, a common arrangement known as Gosiwon(고시원) in Korea, she strives to break the boundary of between the tangible and intangible aspects of human life. Her work expresses this harsh reality measured by the size of the windows in her work, contrasting with the gorgeous Gold colors. 

 

Kwang Bum Jang visualizes the accumulation of time in a physical form by repeatedly layering acrylic paints and using a sanding technique to create brilliant, vaguely psychedelic patterns of mountains and waves. His work expresses not only the flow and accumulation of time but also the coexistence of permanency and impermanency by breaking the boundaries of the past and present.