Our show is dedicated to Korean artists Min Jung Yeon and Shoi, both recently featured by the Musée national des arts asiatiques – Guimet (Paris) through an exhibition (Carte blanche to Min Jung-Yeon, 2019-2020) and a performance (Shoi, My breaths, 2019). 

In Min Jung-Yeon‘s latest works on paper, colour is much more present. The artist works with a ‘letting go’, where paths of fluid matter blends with her extremely minute drawings. As always, the intimate being of the artist is expressing itself. Inspiration drawn from reality mixes with the tradition of ancient Korean painting and the abstract gesture. Everything interlocks, planes superimposes, moves; Min Jung-Yeon skillfully goes back and forth between colour fields, possible perspectives and dynamism, thus creating a visual tension. Multiple scenarios simultaneously play out to narrate with beauty, sensuality and potential drama Min Jung-Yeon’s lasting fascination with the world’s constant movement, of which we are at the same time actors, witnesses and tributaries.

This spring, Shoi started a series of drawings inspired by the sanitary crisis and the world it created. Funny, moving sketches: expressing a rebellion, dreams, anxieties – real and imaginary tales. In her naive, expressive and poignant style, she created stories that touch on the personal and the universal. The palette varies. It is vast, Technicolor style, or more restraint, even melancholic. We meet the artist’s alter ego again – the armless and legless woman – the iconographic character of Shoi’s work for the past six years. A voluptuous female body with no head or arms who appeared when the artist was a young mother.

Her latest ceramic sculptures – a series of anatomical hearts decorated with different animal skins – are a work on racism, rejecting others and neglecting nature, where the heart embodies life.

During ASIA NOW, Shoi will present her performance Mes souffles – M’essouffle (My breaths… leave me out of breath), inspired by the essential role of breath. Just like a shaman, Shoi creates a connection with something so fundamental to each being and makes it visible through a repetitive action: in hangul molib (absorption).

Through a variety of means and motivations, the four Korean artists presented question temporality, impermanence and life experiences that continue to resurface:

Yoon Ji-Eun (b. 1982) sculpts, marks and digs into wood to simultaneously bring together time, place and action. She seeks to account for the continuous interaction between the past, the present and the world of dreams. The walls open onto new horizons, the planes merge into one another…

Lee Jin Woo (b. 1959), like a highly sophisticated labourer, creates strata of traditional materials – Hanji paper and charcoal – inscribing in them the passage of time and the emotions that pass through it. Dense, multifocal landscapes are formed, inviting the eye to move around, to penetrate the surface and to finally be transported elsewhere.

Min Jung-Yeon (b. 1979) is fascinated by the duality residing in all things, by their opposites, their struggles, their encounters and the impulses that flow from them. The works communicate the great existential flow of a world in permanent transformation where instability also transmits an irrefutable force, where meticulous representation and free-flowing gestures coexist.

In the hands of Shoi (b. 1983), the Moon Jar – a type of traditional Korean ceramic container – becomes a form of self-portrait full of sincerity and humor. The interior holds its secrets: dreams, anxieties and desires. Revisiting her Korean heritage, popular beliefs as well as universal and archetypal symbols, Shoi pursues through her new sculptures the development of a personal mythology.