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| Installation view of London-based artist Emma Hart's "Big Mouth" exhibition, at the Barakat Contemporary in central Seoul / Courtesy of Barakat Contemporary |
By Park Han-sol
With the year nearing its end, Seoul has invited a number of notable rising international visual artists for their first solo exhibitions in the country, largely through globally renowned galleries that have begun expanding their presences in the region.
Barakat Contemporary in central Seoul has brought in the curious installations borne from the hands of London-based artist Emma Hart.
In the exhibition titled "Big Mouth," which runs until Jan. 23, the 2016 recipient of the Max Mara Art Prize for Women addresses questions of social class and hierarchy through ceramic sculptures equipped with mischievous humor.
The focus of her latest sculpture series lies in people's daily use of verbal and nonverbal language ― intonation, accents, vocabulary and gestural behavior ― especially in relation to her working-class background and her interaction with other artists within British society.
Seeing how such means of communication can easily turn into factors of judgment and discrimination, the artist explores her own internal conflict that she is not being herself, feeling like a "fraud" as she tries to fit in.
One of Hart's sculptures on display, "Big Mouth" (2021), comprises targets reminiscent of faces. In the eyes of the viewers, a relatable situation soon unfolds, where one becomes the target of other people's judgmental stares ― visualized as a row of arrows stuck on the wall ― when their desperate attempts to blend in through affectation and insincerity fail.
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| Installation view of Polish-German visual artist Alicja Kwade's exhibition, "Sometimes I Prefer to Sit on a Chair on the Earth Surrounded by Universes," held at Konig Seoul / Courtesy of Konig Galerie Berlin, London, Seoul |
Polish-German artist Alicja Kwade continues her yearslong venture into the processes by which we subjectively perceive time and space, and ultimately, our reality, at her first exhibition in Seoul, "Sometimes I Prefer to Sit on a Chair on the Earth Surrounded by Universes."
Presenting over thirty of her latest works simultaneously at Konig Seoul in Gangnam District and Pace Gallery in Yongsan District, the show runs through Jan. 22, 2022.
On view is her new series, "Entropie." "I dropped two water drops in a basin of the same size as the picture [frame]," she said during her interview with Johann Konig, the gallery's founder, adding that she closely observed the patterns of wave interference and visualized them through numerous clock hands scattered and floating freely on the water's surface.
Her way of representing entropy ― a measure of the amount of energy that is unavailable to do work, or in other words, of uncertainty or randomness ― with a series of clock hands suggests the arbitrary and coincidental nature of humans' division of time into hours and minutes, and how such temporality determines our limited perceptions of reality.
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| Paolo Salvador's "Escape" (2021), left, and Shota Nakamura's "walker" (2021) on display at Ilwoo Space in central Seoul / Courtesy of Peres Projects, Berlin |
Other shows in Seoul include "Ensuenos en el Amanecer (Daydreams at Dawn)" and "Walking" at Ilwoo Space in central Seoul, which has invited two young, emerging artists ― Paolo Salvador from Peru and Shota Nakamura from Japan, now both based in Germany.
Salvador's illusory paintings, where wild creatures and humans often appear together, draw from ancient, mythic themes. However, he observes and interprets them from a distance ― reflective of the memories of his past in Peru, as a descendant of the South American people but also an artist who went on to graduate school in London and now lives and works in Berlin.
Nakamura's colorful dreamscapes are languid and relaxed, as people are either walking in the lush green forest, looking pensively ahead, or sitting down on a chair, drooping. "These works on canvas manifest a rejection of the rigidity of contemporary Japanese society and are grounded in an ecofeminist perspective," Berlin-based gallery Peres Projects writes, "a vision of ecosystemic balance that serves as a model for our societies."
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