Doosan Gallery Seoul presents Two Faces from September 1st until October 6th. This exhibition features Songsik Min’s Training Weapons  Series, which was made during his residency at DOOSAN Artist-in-Residence Program in New York, together with his recent landscape paintings.

Min uses the perspective of a bird’s eye view through which the scenes of urban daily life and natural environment are daringly divided. In his paintings, urban landscapes exist together with natural environments such as a spacious green field or the sea while metaphorically conveying urban people’s aspiration to be in the natural environment and their desire to escape from their hectic daily life and to enjoy repose and relaxation. What he attempts to achieve here is the harmonious encounter between the reality of life and its ideal as the well-balanced spaces of the two heterogeneous environments of a city and nature in his paintings

His Training Weapons series takes as its motif wooden toy guns with which he played during his childhood. The structural and elaborate lines and streamlined planes of his toy guns are suggestive of what is hidden behind the surface of a toy of such a kind. This series of works points to what the ‘gun’ as a weapon of war signifies and demonstrate his reflective attitude towards the social (more specifically, military) systems that one is forced to acquire unknowingly through the play of ‘military training’.

In this respect, Two Faces tells about the form and content of Min’ art. Behind his bold divisional structures, congruous color schemes and sophisticated compositions reside yet another stories, and this intently manifests the pictorial possibility for a picture plane to contain a wide variety of stories.

Songsik Min was born in 1972 in Daejeon, Korea. He received his B.F.A. and M.F.A. from Hannam University in Daejeon, Korea. He participated in the DOOSAN Residency New York and had an individual show in DOOSAN Gallery New York in 2011

He has had solo exhibitions at Gallery Hyundai (2010, Seoul, Korea), and doART Gallery (2006, Seoul, Korea). He has been included in exhibitions at alternative space LOOP (2008, Seoul, Korea); Deajeon Museum of Art (2006, Daejeon, Korea). He lives and works in Daejeon, Korea