Not So Smooth _curated by Choi Jae hyeok
This exhibition presents Kong Sung-Hun’s 18 representative pieces, created between 1998 and the present. The artist’s continuous exploration of human life, displaying contemporary era, was previously manifested through his experimental media installation artworks before naturally morphing into paintings, starting in 1998. At the online exhibition hall consisting of three spaces, viewers may come across human beings facing Mother Nature, as well as works that radiate a sense of the improbable and the supernatural from the light of nature and artificiality.
First of all, the Dog and Night series, installed in a dark space, depicts a satellite city sitting near a metropolis, or the partially urbanized Byeokje, a region in Gyeonggi Province. The artist maximizes a night view of dinners and accommodations in a quiet farming village by using dreary and lonesome artificial light, thereby reflecting the contradictory landscape of our society and aspects of modern people’s solitary lives. The other works, developed from these series against the backdrop of Mother Nature in 2011, metaphorically expresses human beings’ existence, the purpose of life, and the voice speaking of reality through the scenic beauty of vast nature. In particular, 'A Smoking Man' and 'Throwing Stones', created against the landscape of Jeju Island, express human anxiety in the face of the power of nature’s vastness by depicting a dusky evening that is neither day nor night; half-clear and half-cloudy, ambiguous weather; and an odd arrangement of figures. At this exhibition, the viewers may discover the delicate, unique sense of Kong’s painting that deals with nature and the reality we live in at this exhibition.
