Venue: Ilmin Museum of Art

As its first exhibition of 2018, the Ilmin Museum of Art (Director Kim Taeryeong) unveils IMA Picks, a project that sheds light on artists in their 30s and 40s who have executed notable activities both at home and abroad for more than 10 years. This exhibition is to be held in the form of solo shows for three artists Ayoung Kim, Lee Moon Joo, and Jung Yoonsuk who were specially selected for this project. IMA Picks has been designed to examine various differences in artists’ ways of interpreting the times of neoliberalism and their works laden with a radical nature. It will also offer an opportunity to mutually share the different aspects and experiences of life they have thus far tackled.

IMA Picks will display the ways by which Korea’s mid-career artists figure out and resist against the times in their own manner through the simultaneous solo shows of these three artists. In the Korean art scene of the early 2000s, a wide array of programs supporting up-and-coming artists were dedicated to discovering young and active artists and introducing their art to the market. Artists who faced commercial frames as eyewitnesses of the times and experimented with their own distinctive visual idioms usually set off on another challenge to attain independence in their late 30s. The directions and strategies by which they experience and visualize aspects of our time are inconsistent. However, such differences are not only a seminal condition to protect possible diversity in global capitalism but also the basis on which such artists strive to pursue possibilities of new solidarity. IMA Picks is intended to provide momentum for these artists’ future endeavors and practices by paying heed to the second round of their activities that are currently on track.

1. Ayoung Kim Solo Exhibition, Porosity Valley
Ayoung Kim (b. 1979) initially majored in visual design but later studied photography and fine arts in England. Her recent solo shows have been held at the Palais de Tokyo (2016) and the 2017 Melbourne Festival (2017). She also took part in the 56th Venice Biennale (2015). She has addressed the matters of sociocultural migration and deformation with a variety of mediums such as image, text, sound, voice, and video, seeking out the potential of different narrative forms with her intrinsic artistic imagination.

2. Lee Moon Joo Solo Exhibition, Sandpile Construction
Lee Moon Joo (b. 1972) graduated from the Cranbrook Academy of Art after studying Western-style painting at Seoul National University and its graduate school. Lee started her activity in earnest in the Korean art scene presenting her solo exhibitions at the Kumho Museum of Art in 2005 and Alternative Space Pool and participating in artist-in-residence programs at the MMCA Residency Changdong, Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, and Nanji Art Studio. Lee’s works are reinterpretations of social realities she has witnessed in paintings. Lee has visualized the hidden side of cities that seems similar to one another everywhere in the world by relating the scenes of social ruins she observed in different spaces and times in Seoul, Detroit, Boston, and Berlin in the mid-1990s.

3. Jung Yoonsuk Solo Exhibition, Lash
Jung Yoonsuk (b. 1981) has actively worked cutting across the border between video and movie after studying plastic arts and documentary film at the Korea National University of Arts and its graduate school. He has laid out narratives on socio-political issues, such as the publicness of the nation and society, the neo-liberal economic system, and the red complex through concrete events in contemporary Korean history like the case of the Jijon Family (a Korean gang) as well as the lives of individuals that he has documented like the Bamseom Pirates band. He has also brought his private feelings toward some problematic situations to the arena of public opinion couched in the language of art and fil

 

+http://ilmin.org/en/exhibition/ima-picks/