Amelia Johnson Contemporary is delighted to announce, Ironic Mythologies. Featuring three of Korea’s most active young artists - Dorothy M Yoon, Hayoung Kim and Hyojin Park, the works have been carefully selected by London and Seoul based,independent curator and art consultant Heejin No Skipwith of Bright Treasure Ltd.
Ironic Mythologies presents three visual languages created by these talented female artists to convey their beliefs, fantasies and challenges in order to draw attention to and even question several social taboos. Initially, their works overwhelm with their vibrant and contrasting colours and techniques. These provocative photographs, stainless steel forms protruding from the wall and effervescent acrylics on drafting films and polyester are united by the artists’ shared experiences and struggles to find their own independent identities following their departures from a society preoccupied with perfection and the preservation of traditional gender roles. Yoon, Park and Kim are all Korean-born graduates of two of the most prestigious arts colleges in London, U.K. While the artists come from different social and economic backgrounds, the complexity of their works gives an insight into the difficult choices they have faced in order to overcome traditional Korean perspectives and succeed as female artists internationally. The title of the exhibition not only describes their individual techniques and concepts but also serves as a comment on their personal stories. Through intense reflection and careful training, each artist has developed their own visual language as a means to communicate, as well as bridge, the cultural and psychological gaps between Eastern and Western Idealism.
Yoon explores her fantasies by adopting various guises. In her ‘8 of Heroines’ series, the artist juxtaposes eight of the Grimm Brothers’ most beloved heroines, with blond hair and oriental features similar to Yoon’s own, against fantastical, Asian-inspired landscapes recreating her childhood fantasies and posing thought-provoking questions about societal expectations of beauty and the pressures that cultural trends place on females today.
Kim’s use of unconventional mediums is innovative and perceptive. Her multi-layered paintings are created using transparent films and opaque polyester fabric. These plastic-like surfaces compliment her cartoon-style imagery. In the multi-layered films, her painting represents elapsed time, perspective, and various actions that are then combined into one harmonious work. In her ‘Eat All You Can’ series, Kim shows us a very vivid picture of how people in our contemporary society consume too much information; in the form of advertisements, iconic images and emoticons from various media, and lack the power to filter and select.
Park’s abstract forms of sculptural figures with painted eyeballs, innocent objects and bright images comprise her ‘Kpop Venus’ series, which has been derived from her 2010 ‘My Eyes Beheld the Glory’ series. Rather erotic and organic forms represent traditional notions of women’s physical and social obligations contrasted and provoked with colourful painterly patterns of naïve and childish objects. The eyeballs represent gazes of prejudice, jealousy, happiness and other emotions that women imagine or experience. Park’s version of Venus is a statement on the new millennium female’s social and notional designations. Historical Venuses have related contemporaneous thinking on female roles and have been manifested through different legendary and womanly figures including Venus of Willendorf and Venus of Milo in the West and statues of Buddhist Bodhisattvas in the East.
