The Nam-Seoul Museum of Art in Seoul will present the group exhibition “With Art” from May 31 to July 30. This exhibition features 13 works by four artists – Jungmo Kwon, Seulgi Lee, Jungjoo Im, and Hyungshin Hwang – 12 of which are new works and include sculpture, furniture, and lighting.

This exhibition is composed of works that are on the border between functional areas such as design, architecture, and crafts related to the surrounding environment and daily life, and fine art, which focuses on appreciation itself. The artists in the exhibition work across these boundaries or borrow concepts and methodologies from each other.

Jungmo Kwon is a designer who reinterprets contemporary lighting through traditional Korean materials. While studying abroad in Korea, he encountered traditional materials used locally and how people in that country still use them in their daily lives, and he has been working on various lighting works using conventional materials while thinking about how to utilize our own materials. In this exhibition, he presents new artworks that harmoniously integrate the architectural elements of hanok windows and the forms of traditional furniture into Western spaces.

Seulgi Lee reinterprets objects, language, and traditional crafts directly related to human life into contemporary art. The artist draws inspiration from folklore and collaborates with domestic and international craftspeople, and her representative series, ‘Blank Project: U,’ is an ongoing collaboration with a quilt maker in Tongyeong. This series of works are inspired by the artist’s own experience of quilting. This exhibition presents four new artworks from ‘Blank Project: U’.

Jungjoo Im expresses his interest in the function of everyday objects around us through various materials such as wood, metal and creates objects and furniture. The exhibition will include 20 works, “(a flock of) Noneloquent”, composed of materials such as wood, concrete, and ossicles, and three works, “Noneloquent for totem”, which reinterprets the architectural space of the Nam-Seoul Museum of Art by combining various forms of sculpture.

Hyungshin Hwang creates his own geometric sculptures by layering polypropylene, metal, and wood. The artist’s representative series, ‘Layered,’ is a constructive response to the memory of the city of Seoul in the 1980s, when redevelopment was in full swing, and seemingly solid buildings to make way for new ones. The exhibition features cold, solid sculpture that use metal to stack and arrange flat elements to form a single cluster over 5 meters.

Rather than a category or genre of fine art, the exhibition focuses on the viewer’s experiential aspect of contemporary objects, which emphasize each other’s qualities by referring to the opposing realms of ‘usability’ in everyday life and ‘appreciation’ in fine art. The works presented in the exhibition are sculptures that are related to our lives or have the potential to be, and we hope that you will have the experience of encountering the works in the exhibition and open your senses to the surroundings in your daily life and look for various meanings in them.