2013 OCI Cre8tive Report, the new artists in residency report exhibition, has been mounted to bring their works, results of their efforts together under the same roof. This title refers to the eight artists’ creative activities and space for an affirmative network pursued by the artist-in studio as a most crucial goal. Ingenious discourse and new communication are expected to be formed through this exhibition by displaying a variety of works in the genres of painting, printmaking, three-dimensional work, and media. 

Kwon Oh Shin begins her work with her happy childhood memories. The artist has concentrated on a monotone series in which specific subject matter repetitively emerges against the background of her grandmother’s roof-tiled house, there in her memory. Kwon repeatedly pours resin onto the base of a lithograph and then attaches a collage cut from the lithograph. In Kwon’s work memories form new space-time through existence, creation, and extinction. Through these the memories have life force to be shared as “ours,” going beyond the reconstruction of a specific memory. 

Kim Yu Jung inspects the “possibility of taming a life form” with the subject matter of ornamental plants. Ornamental plants like potted flowers maintain life with care from someone. The artist contemplates this passive way of growth, in consideration of human life. Kim portrays images by scratching a plaster wall before it dries in traditional fresco technique, creating monotone scenes. The artist pursues the recovery of subjectivity and healing of wounds through an active deed breathing life into the plants by ceaselessly scratching.

Kim Hee-Yon arrests a space exuding a weird feeling in a quotidian urban scene. The artist portrays in painting scenes in which natural objects coexist with disappearing buildings and construction sites in the background. Kim’s work is landscape, but what she has highlighted is the inner expression of a subtle post formed with human action, time, and nature, not aesthetic landscape.

Park Mi-Kyoung represents the multilayers of memories in painting. The artist overlaps silhouettes in many directions through numerous brush strokes, mainly exploiting gloomy tones. She creates the space of a ruin or a distinctive scene in which something wriggles and revives with brush marks throbbing like undulating waves in a deep sea. In Park’s work memories grow on the canvas with a tenacious life force in endless cycles of creation and extinction, associated with deep unconsciousness.

Park Jong-Ho asks an elemental question about painting, “What and why do I have to paint?” He has expressed this with elements blurring the boundary between reality and representation through a repetition of hands drawing a picture, mirrors, and empty canvases. These attempts are meaningful and serious as an artist who produces images, but in a sense they work as a frame confining his thinking. He represents his aspirations by painting unrestrictedly through a sky and sunset seen from his studio window. Park recently worked not only in painting, but in three-dimensional medium and video.

Lee Ju-Eun explores a new sense of sight for the familiar things about her. The artist begins her work arranging parts of things arresting her mind on space directed with space. She repeats processes of photographing a space, pouring resin, and drawing it. Lee mainly works on the plane, but at time process three-dimensional pieces, further underscoring things’ forms with a directed stage atmosphere. 

Cho Moon-Hee investigates the problem of reality and fiction in elements around the realistic world in photography and video. Cho previously concentrated on fictiveness in women fantasies involving images from mass media whereas she recently arrests a broader arena of quotidian life and reality. 

Huh Yong-sung has been consistently concerned with portraying figures. He makes diverse attempts, anchored to the depth of traditional Korean painting. He mainly portrays one figure in one painting. Huh represents his sympathy and compassion for the young generation who lost their way through figures with pale white skin and an anxious, deadpan expression. On display at the exhibition are portraits of colleague artists who lived and worked at the residency during the same term, expressing a deep sympathy for their lives and thoughts as an artist. The portraits in a vacant square frame proceed gradually to communicate with the world.
- Text by Kim, Jihye (curator of OCI Museum of Art)

*image (left)
White woman, 2013
color on Korean paper, 136x120cm
© Yong Seong Heo
courtesy of the artist and OCI Museum of Art