Julian Opie at the Kukje Gallery

Yes, I know he's not Korean. We can't all be. Julian Opie has more than a couple other things going for him however. He's a graduate of the Goldsmith's School of Art in London, he has work at the Tate Modern, New York Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, he designed this pretty dope Blur album cover, and (most importantly) he is my favorite living artsit and he has his first solo exhibition in Seoul right now. 

About himself, Opie has stated, "I seem to deal with working in chunks - I file them as "projects" - it might be a way of drawing or a particular model or a new source of reference. Each project takes a while to get on top of but then seems to expand out into many possibilities." Two such "projects" are represented at Opie's Kukje Gallery exhibition. 

The first floor is reserved for his dancer "Caterina" and for his art collector "Ruth." In this "chunk" of works, Opie explores and expresses human movement. For this project, Julian Opie collaborated with the London Royal Ballet's as part of a project to catch the dancers' movements. Even the LCD work that portrays "Ruth" endlessly shimmering or constantly walking did not completely but me off, perhaps because it stays so true to Opie's signature style despite the embrace of new technologies. 

The second floor of the exhibition hall presents portraits of collectors and the artist's family and coworkers. The portraits are drawn with more detail and precision than anything I'd seen by Opie before. And to top it off, the viewer gets to see how Opie would depict a tree. 

Julian Opie's work has sold for as much as US$70,000 at Christies recently. You might wanna opt for a couple postcards or a baby bib: http://www.julianopieshop.com/

Wandering through Kawashima Hideaki

Tokyo-based artist Kawashima Hideaki possesses quite the pedigree, having studied with Neo-Pop icon Nara Yoshitomo and exhibited in New York with Takashi Murakami. Walking through Kawashima's Wandering exhibition at Kukje Gallery in Insadong, however, one senses something missing. While Kawakshima employs the Manga and animation influences of his forebears, the pop and counter-cultural references that a friend once said, "Make a Westerner feel at home in Asia," are completely absent from Kawashima's work, replaced instead by more organic forms (like vegetables and deep sea creatures).

After dulling to the exhibit's array of colors and the slightly varied contexts for Kawashima's decapitated little-girl-heads, one can survey any room at Kukje and notice one thing: eyes. Everything else seems to blur into the background. Kawashima's large, expressive sets of eyes contrast the pale faces of his subjects and their abyss-like surroundings.

If you would like these eyes on your own wall... say, imposed onto a white egg (below), it will cost you 13 million won (US $10,000). And that's Kawashima's smallest canvas (33.3 x 33.3cm)

If you'd prefer to just visit the gallery and leave with the memories, the exhibition continues through March 29th.