DOOSAN Gallery is pleased to announce SPECTATORS. The exhibition SPECTATORS examines with how an artist observes his or her surroundings, how the artist creates a story out of such surroundings, and how this story forms a relationship with viewers.

Seven painters— Jangpa, Jiyoon Koo, Hyein Lee, Je Lee, Yongseok Oh, Noah Ryu and Hyeonkyeong Yoo— initiate artworks on the basis of novels, myths, or films, or based on their individual experiences, collecting memories about places they have experienced and the people that surround them. They may choose a person whom they have never previously met to sit as a model for a painting, or attempt to reach and grasp their recollections of urban landscapes and trivial details of everyday life. Further, they reveal a collective sense of unease and lethargy that they feel as individuals within an endlessly changing society that has taken on a structure of complexity.

More so than actively engaging in society and the situations or people surrounding them, the artists instead focus on the inner meaning that is created in gazing at and observing these subjects. What they attempt to express is not the subject of their experiences per se, but rather something that cannot be expressed in words, such as essence of the subject’s hidden side, or the mood that emerges from interacting with the subject. Accordingly, their experiences straddle a certain point in between the figurative and the abstract, capturing the story of this process.

Stories that begin with things that the artists observed and experienced leave only traces of lines, colors, figures, and landscapes on the picture plane. As we quietly observe the process of such traces meeting and colliding with one other on the canvases, perhaps we will be able to find the possibility of creating a new relationship with such traces, as well as the possibility of encountering yet another story.

*image (left)
© Hyeonkyeong You
courtesy of the artist and Doosan Gallery