Korean Contemporary Art at London Art Fair 2017
Photo Credit: Visit London
Various galleries from Korea and London-based galleries will be featuring the artists’ latest artworks at this year’s London Art Fair 2017. Contemporary art, ranging from photography to painting, will be showcased to the public and collectors from all levels. Here are the galleries for you to explore during your visit:
Atelier Aki (Main Fair, Booth G4)
Kang Jun Young
Kang’s works convey “Romantic Love”, healing messages, through scribble-like drawings and graffiti on potteries and canvases. His works are based on his inspiration from hip hop music and street culture, which represent his lifestyle during his younger days in Canada. He maintains the freedom of expression with his unique street style element. Also, his latest works include houses that shows emotions, love and family. He was influenced after his father’s passing.
Kang Yeh Sine
Yeh Sine Kang uses her imagination to create narrative plots by drawing her world and themes from her ‘wide-range’ book collection. She creates each drawing within the bookshelves which relates to various of ‘stories’ books to tell.
Kim Nam Pyo
He creates ‘instant landscapes’ by adding onto artificial fur and charcoal onto the canvases. Fantasy-like scenes are shown as various objects and settings in different time and space co-exist. There is no rough sketch and planning ahead before placing his materials to the white canvases. As he places different colours and texture of the fur, he forms the work through ‘the stream of consciousness.
Kim Sea Joong
Kim Sea Joong uses sculpture and painting to present modern concept of space. It reflects on how visitors see the space expand in different forms and colors, from internal core that spreads out externally.
Lee Sea Hyun
“Between Red” is a series of landscape paintings that consist of delicate washes of red. The fragmentation between spaces in each painting evokes multiple conditions, inconsistencies and cracks in mountains and islands. He wants to convey nostalgia and utopia that reflects the sense of past and losses.
Crane Kalamn Brighton (Main Fair, Booth G8)
Choi Young-jin
His photographs focus on South Korea’s coastal landscapes. He creates deep melancholy and breathtaking photos that has a combination of Western abstract and Asian tradition in contemporary point of view.
DECORAZON Gallery
Lee Yun Hee
Ceramic artist Lee Yun Hee is known as the ‘collector’. She collects common stories based on people’s desires, fear, anxiety and how they overcome them. She brings these ‘curing stories’ to live with her own hands with clay as the medium. Lee’s style is focusing on delicate layers and patterns which tells the stories in her artwork.
Do Gallery
Shin Yong Il
When you look closely at the ‘Sunyata a calm soul’ painting series, you could see the detailed scriptures on each canvas. Its hidden and mixed among the characters yet the colors and words convey peace and calmness.
Hanmi Gallery (Art Projects, Booth P14)
Min Joonhong
Visual artist Min Joonhong uses wrapping paper and building materials into 3D installation of cities that reflects chronic anxiety in the fast-moving and urban cities. The cities where people obsess with success, falling behind in the competition and being alienated by others. He adds on his thoughts about the cities through adding ink pen drawings onto the surface of these installations.
Jaye Moon
Jaye Moon uses plastic LEGOs and everyday objects to create structural street art. At this year’s London Art Fair, she will be featuring her latest works, ‘Building a Shelter Together’ and ‘Portable Housing’ that presents a playful and nomadic housing. It ignites visitors’ childhood memories and encourages them to be aware of their own surroundings. Visitors are invited to participate by adding blocks to the work.
Park Junebum
Park’s works focus on routine everyday life in sets of movement arranged into patterns. He explores how the invisible hand of society impact every individual and community. He identifies the flow in the contemporary society.
Shine Artists London (Main Fair, Booth 23)
Lee Jeonglok
Photographer Lee Jeonglok takes images of personal significant landscapes followed by creating them into mesmerizing and magical events. He uses long and multiple exposures, manipulating artificial light and deploying various props on site and in real time. By using ‘Nabi’, the butterfly, as symbol of spiritual world, he takes the visitors into another parallel world through these landscapes.
Lee Jaehyo
Lee sculpts logs and steel nails into polished and refined works. Within the contrast combination of wood and metal, his works reflect on the natural beauty and lets visitors wonder whether they want to ‘sit on’ it. It ignites the visitors’ thoughts about the relationship between themselves and ‘everyday objects’.
Skipwiths
Young Chun Kwang
Based on his past memories with Chinese medicine wrapped packages, he collects hanji, made of mulberry paper, from various ancient books, texts and official documents at second-hand bookstores. The hanji are wrapped around the styrofoams in forms of bojagi, a Korean traditional custom to wrap various objects. These are combined into cubist collages, both natural and various colours, as part of is ongoing series, since 1995, ‘Aggregation’.
Kim Jae Il
Through using acrylic paint on fibre glass resin, Kim wants to convey objects and ideas dynamically in three dimensional sculptural expressions and two dimensional pictorial expressions. He places different forms within the space that represent his own words.
Park Hyojin
Following up with her recent photographic series ‘Secret Garden’, she plays around with the still life-objects as her latest works, ‘Home House’. Each flower display is photographed as a sculpture form. Bright and colourful splashes of paint are added to the flowers to convey dynamic spirit of abstract expressionism. It reflects the celebration of life within the dark background. It shows the correlation between life and death.
Toh Yun-Hee
Toh uses her hands to fully express her impulses and desires in every single layer and colours through her painting series, ‘Night Blossom’. She looks into the “unfamiliar fragments of life” and “the unrevealed part of the phenomena”. Each painting relates to individuals’ relatable everyday lives.
The London Art Fair 2017 will be held at the Business Design Centre, Islington from 18 to 22 January. Click here for tickets and time. Find more information about the galleries, artists and artworks at Artsy’s (official online partner) London Art Fair 2017 website. If you have an iPhone, you can download the Artsy mobile app which you will have your personalized visitor’s guide in knowing more about the artists and galleries.
Note: All images are sourced from and credited by Artsy and participating galleries.
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