Event
Kang Dasom & Cho Hyun Soo: Korean Residency Program
25 Jan 2018
Regular hours
- Thursday
- 14:00 – 18:00
Cost of entry
Free
SomoS Art House Berlin is proud to announce a special presentation of the work of two young Korean artists, Kang Dasom and Cho Hyun Soo, as part of a new Korean residency cooperation between Keum Art Projects, SomoS, and the Changwon National University in South Korea.
About
SomoS Art House Berlin is proud to announce a special presentation of the work of two young Korean artists, Kang Dasom (sculpture and painting) and Cho Hyun Soo (painting), as part of a new Korean residency cooperation between Keum Art Projects (Berlin), SomoS, and Korean Universities, in this case the Changwon National University, Changwon, in South Korea.
The 1-day presentation gives an overview of the work the two artists have produced during their stay at SomoS.
About the Artists:
Cho Hyun Soo, was born Korea 1994; uses themes from the rich Korean painting tradition, combined with contemporary elements, such as collage.
Thematically, the traditional Asian motif of the “Four Gracious Plants” is the staring point of her work. In this highly coded Confucian genre, bamboo is usually presented as symbolizing the dignity of a virtuous person. As Cho Hyun Soo puts it, “Bamboo’s green color represents the fresh spirit, straight shape shows the iron-willed, upright attitude, hollow stem shows a greedless, unworldly mind, and bendable-but-not-breakable straightness shows strong fidelity and tenacious will.”
Cho Hyun Soo reinterprets these classic Korean painting concepts, widening of their technique, and adding a more contemporary sensitivity, while retaining their sense of subtlety and poetry.
As she puts it, “I use various experimental techniques, aiming for a new type of expression of the traditional Four Gracious Plants, collaging thin metal foil. As the collaged foils begin to peel, discolor, and corrode naturally as time goes by, these natural changes over time show unartificial, natural beauty in the screen. Interestingly, as time goes by, copper foil become corroded with some changes in their physical properties, while gold- and silver foil do not change their physical properties. So the parts that have gone through changes and those that did not show a different beauty, with different associations. It is these differences that provide the screen with a deep sense of space.
I would like to study changing things and unchanging things in depth through this work.”
Kang Dasom, born 1994 works in painting and sculpture.
The fundamental motto of her work is the desire for the dignity of life. In her view, technocratic modern life, which places capital in the center of all values has become universal and has resulted in the loss of humanity, and a trend that ignores and neglects the value of life.
Among the frequent negative phenomena, Kang Dasom became especially interested in animal abuse as a theme for her work, stating “While studying and scrapping articles about animal abuse, I have come across an article on the depression of companion animals. The trend of an increasing number of people with companion animals is a phenomenon due to the change of family systems to single-family. Since I have a companion animal and I realized the big meaning of a small life, also experienced producing and selling accessories for companion animals, the article caught my attention. Before I think about the dignity of life for animals in the world, I thought that I should know how to respect the life at my side, so I started working on the theme of ‘depression of companion animals.’”
