[Exhibition Contents] Concrete+Jungle (2023 Open Call Artists) : Korea.net : The official website of the Republic of Korea

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[Exhibition Contents] Concrete+Jungle (2023 Open Call Artists)

Concrete+Jungle (2023 Open Call Artists)

Showcasing the Works of KyungJin JEONG, Ken CHUNG, Mindy LUI and Yiseul JUNG

Four Artists from Korea and Hong Kong, during Art Basel Hong Kong 2023 Week

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Venue:

Korean Cultural Center in Hong Kong

6-7/F Block B, PMQ, 35 Aberdeen Str., Central, Hong Kong

Date:

17 March (Fri) to 20 May (Sat) 2023
Tue - Sat, closed on public holidays

Admission:

Free Admission

The Korean Cultural Center in Hong Kong presents the upcoming exhibition Concrete + Jungle (2023 Open Call Artists), featuring the major artworks of the four artists from Korea and Hong Kong, KyungJin JEONG, Ken CHUNG, Mindy LUI and Yiseul JUNG including their paintings, installations and video productions. The artists captured moments that they had witnessed in daily lives and presented them from their perspectives, using their own media of presentation. They address different topics in the living environment, daily items and the cities surrounding them. They zoom in on every mundane bit in their daily lives with their penetrating insights into the space they live in.

The term ‘Concrete Jungle’ may or may not sound familiar. All of us may somehow understand the term as a ‘forest of buildings’, but the nuance of the term may differ from person to person. The definition of ‘Concrete Jungle’ is ‘a city or urban area which has a high density of large, unattractive, modern buildings and is perceived as an unpleasant living environment’, which obviously sound negative. Nowadays, the term ‘Concrete Jungle’ is no longer common in the United States. However, at the same time, you may find trendy bars or fashion brands in Korea named as ‘Concrete Jungle’.

The peculiar ambiguity of the term probably comes from the coexisting positive and negative images of the words ‘Concrete’ and ‘Jungle’. Until the early 21st century, concrete still gave a negative image of an unattractive construction material, as it often symbolized a grey city that lacks uniqueness. However, as cement floors and walls, which maximize the modern and industrial elements of an interior design, have become a trend recently, concrete is no longer unattractive and needs not to be covered by wallpaper or paint.

Likewise, although jungle, which has an opposite imagery to concrete, implicitly symbolizes savageness and the lack of civilization, it also reminds urban people of a romantic and adventurous nature that constructs exotic scenery.

The artists share the theme ‘City Life’. They treat the characteristics discovered in their observation in daily lives, especially in their city lives and living environments, as the subjects of their artwork. They observe mundane items, such as laundry under the sun, rice grains and a boiler in a bathroom, as well as unique items, such as goshiwon (a tiny dorm room), an old house with water leaks, an adapter that converts voltage and an artificial scene of nature in a city. It remains as the audience’s decision, instead of the artists’, to determine whether the subjects are general or unique. Except for Jeong’s work, it is not easy to determine how the artists see the city and the place they are living in, in terms of whether they are critical or affirmative. They leave the decision to the audience by not making any judgement to their work but only putting the moments of discovery and what they observed in their work. For both the artists and audience, the image of the cities they live come as either concrete, jungle or concrete jungle.

KyungJin Jeong, who is interested in housing problems, presented her work in the form of videos, installations and an interactive web program based on her personal experience. In her artwork, she particularly featured her experience in finding a house in the United States and ‘goshiwon’, a unique form of accommodation in Korea. Moreover, her videos and interactive web program were motivated by the gap between the realistic and fictional image shown in video and photo ads.

Ken Chung featured items that are commonly found on the streets of Hong Kong and in ordinary houses in his installations and sculpture painting work. An external wall in the street with peeling paint, a boiler in a bathroom of an old Hong Kong flat and a PVC Water pipe become the object of his artwork. When you look at the texture of his artwork, you can feel the moist through the mould and moss on the old walls as if you are in a wet bathroom in Hong Kong.

Yiseul Jung captures the artificial natures in the city centre of Seoul and present them through various media. She named the natural scenery found everywhere in the city as the ‘City Garden’ and created ‘garden@city’ series. It includes forest landscapes printed on the fence surrounding a construction site, artificial turves outside a building, floral wallpapers and painted trees. She produced her series of work with photos, paintings, installations, sculptures and videos.

Mindy Lui observes various objects in her daily life and studies the bonding between humans and the objects. She produced paintings, installations and videos using different objects, including adapters, blankets, one rice grain and Arowana fish that symbolize luck in China. She addresses the unclear boundaries between public and private matters with the fact that people show their most private item in the most public area, as she sees blankets being hung in a park. She is also inspired by the similarity between rice grains, which the most common and trifling, yet the most important item in Asian eating culture, and '、', a special punctuation mark in Chinese. She presents her work in the form of a meditative video.

* Download high resolution images and other exhibition materials at:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Q3KrBwRzqbBoTEn9ECFiXtLqf-_Jfdiu?usp=share_link