The Art of the Obsessions Collective
Zebrastraat Art & Cultural Center, Ghent, Belgium
June 20 - July 28, 2013
Opening Reception: June 20



Two-person Exhibition of Kyung Jeon | Eemyun Kang
Kukje Gallery, Seoul, Korea
Artists include:
Heung-Heung Chin, Zaria Forman, Beatrice Glow, Scott Irvine, Kyung Jeon, Bea Kwan Lim, Michael Macioce, Kate Manheim, John McVicker, Raha Raissnia, Mark Seidenfeld, Madeline von Foerster

In 2010, John Zorn created a platform to support honest, passionate, imaginative and technically proficient artists, who work independent of the established art scene. He named this organization Obsessions Collective.

John Zorn and curator Dany Vandenbosche organize an exposition, consisting of the artwork of thirtieen artists: Heung-Heung Chin, Kyung Jeon, Raha Raissnia, Madeline von Foerster, Bea Lim, Beatrice Glow, Michael Macioce, Kate Manheim, John McVicker, Zaria Forman, Mark Seidenfeld, Ashley Thayer en Scott Irvine.

The exposition is the European premiere, and will be held at the exposition hall in Zebrastraat, from June 20 to July 28. Free entrance for those holding a ticket for Ghent Jazz Festival 2013.

Zebrastraat is the Liedts-Meesen foundation’s exposition hall. Zebrastraat combines living, meeting and experiencing home, culture and economy. The Zebrastraat wants people to experience culture and therefore leaves current paths on the left. We rather offer a forum of promising young artists, unusual themes and new art movements. The total surface of the exposition hall is 750m², spread over two floors and with separate rooms dedicated to video art. Obsessions Collective is a perfect match with Zebrastraat’s visions.

EXPOSITION OBSESSIONS COLLECTIVE

June 20 – July 28
zebrastraat 32
9000 Ghent
Entrance: 2,5 euros (only at the entrance)
Free entrance for those holding a ticket to Ghent Jazz festival 2013

Kyung Jeon | Eemyun Kang
Kukje Gallery, Seoul, Korea
August 23 - September 23, 2012
Opening Reception: August 23, 5pm



Two-person Exhibition of Kyung Jeon | Eemyun Kang
Kukje Gallery, Seoul, Korea
August 23 - September 23, 2012
Opening Reception: August 23, 5pm

Kukje Gallery is pleased to announce a two-person exhibition of Kyung Jeon and Eemyun Kang. Known for their unique idiosyncratic approach to painting, the artists are widely celebrated for playing with symbolic vocabularies and formal approaches to painting. Jeon and Kang will both exhibit new works made specifically for the exhibition.

Based in the US, Kyung Jeon work is founded on the artist's keen interest in creating psychological narratives, many of which directly reference her experiences growing up as a first generation Korean American.

Eemyung Kang lives and works in London. Receiving attention since her studies at The Royal Academy of Arts, London, Kang has developed a recognizable style that explores core themes of nature and the myth of metamorphosis.


Kyung Jeon (b. 1975) work draws on influences as diverse as children's fairy tales, traditional Korean genre paintings, and modern canonical paintings. Her playful and often dark stories are based on a combination of personal and historical references that upturn static themes of childhood and innocence. Known for her subtle application of traditional and contemporary painting styles, Jeon paints on rice paper mounted to canvas. Exploiting the rice paper's traditional reference to Korean folk painting alongside her own funny and uncanny themes the artist is able to explore the intersection of past and present.

Jeon's paintings are immediately inviting, presenting a light-hearted and innocent world depicted in pastel-toned images of semi-nude girls and cheeky little boys. However, upon closer look, the works reveal an alternate reality brimming with acts of violence and earthly pleasures. The artist is adept at weaving these dark and light themes together in dynamic compositions that draw the viewer in and allow them to reconsider their own nostalgic reality. For her exhibition at Kukje, Jeon will exhibit a new series of mural-sized works titled Waterlilies. Her Waterlilies capture an arcadian world inspired by Claude Monet's seminal series Water Lilies. The gentle setting is framed as a paradisical microcosm for children only to slowly betray its more sinister identity as a place for wickedness, from swimming and playing to spying and drowning. Numerous disparate stories are presented together in a complex web that has no beginning or end. The works in this new series engage the artist's on-going exploration of storytelling by a means of filling-in, reinventing, and re-sorting gaps in history.

Kyung Jeon was born in 1975 in Jersey City, New Jersey. She studied art and philosophy in Boston College and received her MFA from the School of Visual Arts, NY. Jeon is the recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2009) and was the Associate Artist in Residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, funded by the Joan Mitchell Foundation (2009). She has held numerous solo exhibitions including Savannah College of Art and Design, and participated in group exhibitions in museums and galleries in Asia, U.S.A., Europe and South America, including Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art in Seoul. Jeon lives and works in NYC.


Eemyun Kang's exquisite paintings depict her fascination with nature and the process of morphology. Ably translating organic forms into lush abstractions, Kang creates complex worlds marked by energetic and fluid brush strokes.

For the exhibition at Kukje Gallery, Kang takes the changing seasons as a central motif. In addition she has combined a disparate group of literary sources as inspiration including Alaskan Inuit myths, a poem A year of thinking / thinking of a year by artist and writer Fabien Peak, written in response to and inspired by Kang's paintings, and the Biblical story of Jonah and the whale. These three sources form the basis for the narratives contained in Kang's new paintings.

The artist defines myth as a tool for understanding nature and events in the real world. For Kang, "Myth is a tool that operates through the creative imagination. Myth as traditional tales, legends and folklores are also linked with use of myth in my paintings as a starting point for creating a narrative of events."

The ideas behind these stories are not illustrated figuratively or in a linear narrative but are intended to be read by the viewer intuitively. The stories allude to simple pictorial references including whales, fungi, snow, wind, moon, forests and valleys. These elements shift and combine, allowing for transformation to take place on a metaphorical level and formally in complex layers of paint on canvas.

Alternating between abstract and figurative registrars, Kang creates imagined hybrid worlds or mystic landscapes. In Kang's paintings, the paint and canvas constitute transformative elements that mediate between subject and object, subconsciousness and consciousness, abstraction and figuration. Kang is also known to leave the canvas appear unfinished, a decision that activates the canvas and mirrors nature's infinite process of change and transformation.

Eemyun Kang was born in 1981 in Busan, Korea. She obtained her BA from The Slade School of Fine Art and completed her postgraduate studies at The Royal Academy of Arts, where she was awarded the school's prestigious Gold Medal upon graduation in 2009. She has also received her doctorate degree from University of East London. Kang's work has been exhibited widely in the UK as well as internationally, including group shows at the Seoul Arts Center, and the Korean Culture Center in London. She has a solo exhibition forthcoming in 2012 at the Trondheim Museum of Art, Norway. Eemyun Kang currently lives and works in London.

Address
Kukje Gallery
54 Samcheong-ro, Jongno-gu Seoul, 110-200 Korea Tel: + 82) 2 735 8449 / Fax: + 82) 2 733 4879
email: kukje@kukjegallery.com
www.kukjegallery.com