Hyehyeon Kwon - Movable Point

About

Movable Point showcases an installation of drawings and ceramic works produced by Hyehyeon during an extended residency at SomoS. Taking inspiration from the signs, landmarks, symbols and maps that comprise Berlin’s urban informational grid, the artist provides her own interpretation, making sense of her disorienting new surroundings assisted by the essential and returning symbol of the dot.

In this exhibition, Hyehyeon Kwon extends her ongoing interest in the idea of “home” into “place,” including considerations of belonging, migration and orientation. As critic Lee Dong-hyun wrote in Viewers magazine, hers “is a new perception of place centered on non-physical media such as texts and images, rather than the traditional physical space where individual experiences are accumulated.”

As an outsider who recently arrived in an unfamiliar Berlin, with no access to the spoken language, Hyehyeon re-creates a "safe reality," rendering its symbols and icons unrecognizable. Ordinary city signs, such as those of the subway, supermarkets, public libraries, and traffic lights, are blown out of their original proportion to reappear as mutated shapes eventually. The distortion serves to produce a sort of contradiction. Indeed, the intention pursued by the artist is to confound the viewers in front of their cultural signs – an ironic way of enabling Berliners to view their urban environment with fresh eyes; to feel empathy with the “outsider;” and to consider what constitutes home.

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Hyehyeon Kwon obtained a BFA (2015) and a MFA at the Ewha Woman's University in Seoul (South Korea), specializing in ceramics. Between 2015 and 2020, Kwon presented her work in several group exhibitions in South Korea and Japan. In 2020 her work was on display in two solo exhibitions in Seoul; at Sanwoollim Art and Craft and at Gallery Meme. She received various awards as a student and beginning artist, including the Sanwoollim Art & Craft Young Artists Award in 2019 and the Young Korean Artists Association Award in 2020. The artist's “Map Projections” received an Honorable Mention at the 2021 Cheongju International Craft Competition, at the Cheongju Craft Biennale in South Korea.

Hyehyeon Kwon’s artist residency at SomoS is kindly supported by the Arts Council Korea - ARKO.