We wanted to send out our love and appreciation to Juxtapoz for featuring Kwon Kyung-yup’s current exhibition Melancholia.
Visit Juxtapoz’s website for the full article.
“We have been noticing Kwon’s work over the past few years, and she is part of a group of great young Korean artists that have made that country one of the most exciting places in contemporary art.” – JUXTAPOZ
New York meets Korea in our latest exhibition with artists Kwon Kyung-yup and Matthew Grabelsky. Kwon’s “Melancholia” took over Thinkspace Gallery’s main room creating a beautiful stillness to absorb and take in her latest body of work. In the project room Grabelsky’s “Underground” brought the bustling stories that exist within (what at times is) the most mundane moments, riding public transit. Both exhibitions are on view through May 21st, the juxtaposition of their stories to be experienced in person. Please visit the Thinkspace Gallery website to view all available works from Underground and Melancholia.
Opening reception photos courtesy of Bryan “Birdman” Mier.
Thinkspace Gallery is proud to present Kwon Kyung-yup’s latest body of work with her solo exhibition “Melancholia.” In anticipation of the show we have an exclusive interview with Kwon Kyung-yup sharing with us her love for oil paint and connection to her work.
What do you like about oil paints as a medium?
I work with very slow breathing as though I meditate. As oil paintings dry slower than other paintings, I complete my work for one to two months, observing the progress of the work. I enjoy paintings made with great effort for a long period. I would love to be a master artisan before I am an artist. Oil paintings are appropriate to depict abundant colors of the skin. They are also excellent materials to adjust degrees of gloss and transparency.
What themes or ideas were you exploring in this new body of work?
I wanted to draw a character who reviews one’s life while dreaming of something behind the reality. My characters are immersed in deep contemplation or meditating. In the painting “Red Moon” and “Romance”, I wanted to draw the image of a human withdrawing into one’s inside, contemplating or longing for the ideal beyond the reality. The red color appearing here expresses the energy that pursues beauty while trying to fill in the deficiency and casting an immortal spell on the human body.
The title of the painting “I lock the door upon myself” was taken from that of the painting “I lock the door upon myself” of Fernand Khnopff, a Belgian symbolist painter of the 19th century. I wanted to express the melancholic emotion bounding towards the inside world, being disconnected from the outside world.
The painting “Primavera” ‘s theme is spring. Recently, I have been learning and enjoying the beauty of daily things while drawing a series on spring. The flowers and plants surround the character have the meaning of healing just like the bandage I have been drawing so far.
In the paintings “Strum”, “Surreal Memory” and “Cherish”, the girls are drawn as if they were discolored by the long flow of time; this is the metaphor of the memory’s nature of fading with time.
In the expression of loneliness and loss, I extracted and expressed only certain traces left by the memory while hiding personal narratives.
Instead, I made it possible to interpret the painting in various ways by filling the void space with the language of “silence” or substituting with specific colors or symbols; the scope of interpretation was extended by placing metaphoric elements inside the painting.
Can you explain what a day in the studio would looks like?
I get the best paintings when I concentrate on painting in my studio the whole day. And I get the inspiration for the next work at that moment.
Do you use models as a reference or do you paint the people from your imagination?
I describe characters with a realistic grammar; however, I emphasize imaginative elements and fantasy above all. There are paintings in which my family and friends were models while many other ones were drawn from imagination without a model.
This time, I painted two pieces with boys as models, they are Chanyeol and Sehun, members of the K-pop star group EXO. Based on the experience of having drawn Girls Generation’s members while doing collabo work with SM Entertainment in Korea in 2012, I realized that the images of the singers fit well with those of my paintings and found a new possibility for my paintings.
What do you do when you’re not painting?
I like reading books. I get the desire to create something through literature works rather than works of art. I get inspiration from Russian literature such as Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy which expose human nature while also give the feeling of magnificence and nobleness. I enjoy reading Japanese novels intergrating realism and surrealism, the romanticism literature of the 19th century including Goethe and the illusionist literature of Borges.
What is your favorite food?
Sincerely prepared food
Is there a piece in this show you are more connected to than the others?
Bandaged works. I cannot exactly explain why but I had a special feeling when I painted the works. I cannot logically explain for that. I was 100% immersed in the work depicting my feeling at that moment very well.
In “Primavera”, I was able to enjoy the painting while using orange, green and yellow color during the course of drawing flowers and plants.
How have you grown as an artist over the last 5 years?
I feel how precious each day’s work is.
What do you think is the biggest blessing and challenge of being an artist?
I think that art means expressing the world with one’s unique perspective. An artist must reconstruct one’s view of understanding the world in a unique way. That is, a unique view of the world is needed and that view has to be always refreshed. In addition, aesthetic experience is also required as it is important to add aesthetic quality. Artistic experience does not just occur inside art but can occur in various areas.
Attend the opening reception of Kwon Kyung-Yup’s “Melancholia” exhibition this Saturday, April 30th from 6-9pm. Visit the Thinkspace Gallery website for additional information on the exhibition.
ARTIST NOTE //
Me seen by myself, me seen by another person. There is a room of mirrors, endlessly looking face-to-face. One is my mirror while the other is that of another person looking at me. Just as many images are formed when the two mirrors face each other, how can I explain the many images of myself? I can’t know who I am, which one of these is my real image.
I become different depending upon which state, situation and reality I am facing or which philosophy and attitude I have in my life. That is, I can see myself only indirectly through something else then myself. Just like most artists. a work reflects its artist in some way and thus can be interpreted as a mirror of the mind with the internal myself projected on it.
I see one side of myself through my paintings; however, the work’s meaning changes continuously according to my varying emotional states and their changes. Just as my image inside the mirror changes with the flow of emotions, The figure in my painting is a Melancholiker who is always silent and many secrets are hidden in that silence.
The feature of my job is the visual expression of a human’s feeling, emotion, and mood that is hard to express; the expression is based on the fundamental experience shared by all humans. As the work was expressed in a wide context, the detailed meanings of each work can change according to the emotional line of the human looking at the painting.
As my self-portrait hides a private narrative, it can show my mother or sister or become a mirror of the mind showing the painting’s viewer. Thus, a painting is the space for thinking. The viewer of a painting can discover one’s present or past view through my painting and also project one’s own inside on the painting then retrieve it again to read it subjectively.
Kwon Kyung-Yup: Melancholia
April 30, 2016 – May 21, 2016
Thinkspace Gallery is pleased to present Melancholia, the gallery’s first solo exhibition of paintings by Korean artist Kwon Kyung-Yup. A graduate of Sejong University in Korea, where she completed an M.F.A, Kwon is currently based out of Seoul. Known for her pale ghostly paintings of delicately rendered figures, the artist uses the human body in her imagery as a vehicle for healing, mourning, and memory. Meditative in their starkness and otherworldly in their filmy delicacy, her figurative depictions are cathartic and emotional, suggesting both trauma and recovery, forgetting and remembering.
Kwon’s figures seem suspended in time, arrested in a sort of ageless androgyny. They are beautiful, and yet unspecific, functioning more like symbolic emblems than individual subjects. When creating her work she describes a process of emotive recall in which she revisits emotional events from her past, actively summoning memories to inspire the work. The figure becomes a literal instrument of psycho-spiritual expression through which she explores universally relatable, though intensely personal, themes of femininity, sexuality, death, libidinal impulse, transformation, and ego. The human body becomes a poetic device through which Kwon explores existential drives and deficiencies.
The artist describes her paintings as meditative spaces in which she depicts longing, sadness, and fantasy. A deliberate slowness and calm are typical of their tone and pace. A single figure, minimally adorned, tends to occupy the focus of the foreground. Surrounded by a still expanse of emptiness, there are few other details, if any, to distract from the complete presence of the form. The viewer is left feeling captivated, drawn in by the concise simplicity of the image, submerged in its heavy quietude. The figures’ skins convey a nuanced depth and pallor, an impressive range of gradation and muted color that resonates through several thin, carefully applied, layers of oil paint. Kwon’s attention to the translucent rendering of these milky skins, and the contrast she creates with subtly bloodshot eyes and carefully stylized features transports the figurative realism in her work beyond the realm of naturalism. The figures are excessively human in their pristine vulnerability, and yet entirely other, emotionally charged, and surreal.
At times, the bodies depicted in Kwon’s works are wrapped in bandages, caught somewhere between life, trauma, death, and convalescence. This space of ambiguity in which the self is suspended somewhere between a beginning and an end is a recurrent theme in her work. Measured and introspective, Kwon’s process is thoughtful rather than reactive, and each piece takes up to two months to complete. She begins her paintings in a contemplative state, a literal meditation aided by conscious breath work, and carefully allows the surface to live, extracting wraiths from the void.
