Beyond the Line

UNC Gallery of Insadong has recently opened a sister gallery in Cheongdam. It's so new, in fact, that if you were there last week you could still see the previous occupant's nail salon sign on the back door.  Don't be fooled. 

Though it's a small space (probably suited well to solo exhibitions), the UNC crew decided to kick off their new branch with three contemporary Korean artists united in their struggle to get "beyond the line."  As the official exhibition statement states, "Three artists' work processes are in common serious and resolute in that all of them search for truth..." Whatever that means. 

Luckily it doesn't take a press release to see that each of these artists (Ham Myeong-su, Hyeja, and Jokk Han) resist the straight, clean, and crisp lines that mark much of the animation-influenced Asian art today. Hyeja's fluid, almost surreal color shapes remind one of looking at a street scene through a rain-slicked windshield, while Ham Myeong-su creates cityscapes and still lifes from "tubes" of color that sometimes look like yarn and sometimes like something more organic, like grass. 

The stand-out of the exhibition, however, is Jokk Han, who uses abstract expressionist techniques to depict disturbing psychic and dream-like landscapes in oil. At his best, Han conveys the feeling that you are escaping from a plane crash only to find yourself in a dark, marshy swamp--or awakening from a bad dream with the traces of that inner turmoil burned onto canvas for all to see.

Han's work is available for roughly US$3,000 and is worth checking out.