Kim Byung-Joo, Kim Yong-Kwan

김병주 Ambiguous wall-Symmetry B3939-S140_Laser cut steel, Urethane paint._140x140x30cm_2023

Gallery Joeun is pleased to present the duo exhibition “Ambiguous Parallax” by Kim Byung-Joo (b. 1979) and Kim Yong-kwan (b. 1980) from May 30 to June 29. The two artists express a new space-time in which multi-layered time differences coexist with their unique, minimalist, geometric language.

김병주, Ambiguous wall-Symmetry S140, Laser cut steel, Urethane paint, 140x140x30cm each, 2023

Kim Byung-Joo expresses a new dimension of space through a series of reliefs in the form of a grid. Thin, hard, precisely laser-cut steel lines intersect in a vertical and horizontal grid, creating a perspective that adds depth to the space. Simultaneously with the construction of the geometric grid structure in the primary colors, an empty space is created, and the width and height of the iron structure are clearly visible, but there is no corresponding volume.

Kim Byung-Joo’s grid structure “Ambiguous Wall”, in which the boundary between inside and outside becomes ambiguous depending on the viewing angle, simultaneously creates and dissolves the boundary between inside and outside. In order to grasp the shape of the three-dimensional structure on the wall, the viewer constantly changes the distance to the work, whereby two and three dimensions, single and several viewing angles are superimposed and the viewer’s perceptual experience and reality are vaguely distorted. The work is perceived anew every moment through the viewer’s movement, and the empty space of the structure is filled with the overlapping memories and temporality of the viewer, and the work is no longer a form with a single totality, but is constantly reorganized and changed by multilayered differences in time.

The artist, who graduated from Hongik University’s Department of Sculpture and its Graduate School with a Master’s degree in Fine Arts from UAL Chelsea college of Arts in London, England, and a PhD in Sculpture from Hongik University, continues to be active in the national and international art world, who is participated in Art Miami in 2021 and 2022, also had a solo exhibition in Montreal, Canada in 2022. Large reliefs are collected and exhibited at major domestic art institutions such as the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Art Bank, Seoul Museum of Art and Pohang Museum of Art, as well as Terminal 2 of Incheon International Airport. The exhibition includes hanging installations that pay homage to Josef Albers, the master of American abstract art, including his representative series ‘Ambiguous Wall’.

김용관, Parallax-Viewport, acrylic-on-canvas, 114x114cm, 2024

The three-dimensional structure of Kim Byung-Joo continues in Kim Yong-kwan’s (b. 1980) two-dimensional painting. The ‘Parallax Viewport’, in which black and white striped patterns occupy the entire canvas, is a world of assumptions in which a ‘square cube’ is viewed through an isometric projection. Before it converges to one side, the different possibilities of the three sides of the cube (front, plane and side) are made visible in various patterns. The characteristics of two-dimensional painting, in which no perspective is applied and no shadows are present, create a visual and perceptual illusion in the eyes of the viewer. The patterns, whose boundaries are blurred by the perspective illusion, seem to overlap in front and behind, creating a coexistence of multi-layered parallax. A new space and a new time unfold.

The parallaxes that occur when an observer observes the same object contradict each other and cannot coexist. Like a thrown dice, they eventually converge on one side, but the artist, who believes that a chosen perspective is by no means inevitable, assumes that if a different choice had been made at the point of intersection, “another category would have survived.” In other words, the artist’s work attempts to find other ways of seeing that have not survived or been uncovered in the physical, historical and conceptual world, and to reconstruct them in parallel. The ‘Parallax Viewport’ is a series of images that visualize various parallax differences and different possibilities before focusing on a single point of view, “questioning the structure of the world itself and rearranging values horizontally”

김용관, Parallax-Viewport, acrylic-on-canvas, 171x171cm, 2024

Kim Yong-kwan, who disassembles and rearranges finished compositions, uses dots, lines, planes, shapes, patterns, puzzles, tangrams, mosaics, cubes, isometric drawings, modules, abstractions and semi-abstractions to express a new space and time based on assumptions, settings or rules. He studied printmaking at Hongik University and had a two-person exhibition at Suwon Ipark Museum of Art in 2017, a solo exhibition at Busan Museum of Art in 2022, and designed a lounge area at Leeum Museum of Art. His works are collected at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, the Seoul Museum of Art and the Gyeonggi Children’s Museum. The artist, who works in a variety of media and fields from painting to installation and animation, will present a variety of new paintings from small to large in this exhibition, which, together with Kim Byung-Joo’s three-dimensional works, will offer visitors a new visual and perceptual aesthetic experience.

Gallery Joeun
3, Itaewon-ro 55 ga-gil, Yongsan-gu, Seoul, Republic of Korea
+82-2-790-5889

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