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).