“Night, the beloved. Night, when words fade and things come alive. When the destructive analysis of day is done, and all that is truly important becomes whole and sound again. When man reassembles his fragmentary self and grows with the calm of a tree.’’
- Antoine Marie Roger de Saint Exupery 1900-1944

Today’s society requires hectic behaviors to live a busy life and cognitive ability to digest excessive information. This all seems that the Day never ends and the Night never comes. A Day that demands the view to see and understand the surrounding environment expeditiously and a Day that produces new information and knowledge endlessly. These characteristics of the Day are exaggerated in the current society and many artists living in this era of the Day are confronted with such phenomena continuously and create provocative statements like they compete in the deluge of information. It is rare to come across an art work that captures the eyes and visits the inner landscape of the mind and depicts the depth of the Night, especially a work that reconstructs and reinvents the pure potential of the night through productive deviation.

The silence of the Night swallows the voice into the darkness and its texture with different temperature and atmosphere from that of the heated day awaken new senses. All objects in the dark Night seem blurred losing the details. The mind’s eye becomes weak and the perception through various senses becomes stronger. The Night leads us more to encounter and experience the world without pre-existing consciousness than to see and understand the world as the object.

In Hyunggeun Park’s deep blue-green forest in which the light is devoured to dense trees and shrubs, we feel the moist air and buzzing sound more dominantly than we observe the details of the landscape. His photograph strongly draws us to the inside of his deep forest than leaves us stand its outside and see it in the distance. Manna Lee who used to wander at night must have been enchanted by the darkness of the Night that allows him to experience the same objects differently. His paintings describing everyday landscape and objects but in unfamiliar look and feeling freeze the intense moment when he ran into the object like for the first time at nightfall when everything seems vague and mysterious.

Hyunggeun Park and Manna Lee’s works are associated with the physical characteristics of the dark Night that intensify the phenomenological encounter with the world. On the other hand, Minsu Kang and Jihyun Jung remind us of Gaston Bachelard’s dreamer in front of a solitary candle light in the dark.

A mind trip at Night brings up the time and space in the memory and merges the past with the present and the future. Minsu Kang paints the children in the background of the imaginary idyll landscape reminding us of one’s own childhood as the idealized world and the stories and incidents about the children in real life. His paintings seem to explore the link among memory, reality and imagination. Jihyun Jung assembles discarded everyday objects adding odd movement with creaking sound. As the poem of the objects, his work seems as dreaming and personal but at the same time as it also involves more macro topics such as the individual and collective and everyday life and social structure, it resembles the wide spectrum of musing at Night.

The Night has philosophical meaning and aesthetic depth which expands its definition beyond a certain range of time with dark surroundings. A Day has 24 hours and the half of the earth resides in the darkness for twelve hours due to the rotation of the earth. However, the width of the Night cannot be objectively confined to the dark area of the earth opposite to the sun but be expanded into the universe or the inner world boundlessly broadened from the eyes when shut down. The exhibition interprets the Night as the infinite field of the potentiality that widely unfold the horizon of the consciousness, senses and communication through the works that explore the expanded and multilayered meaning and imagery of the Night.