Poster image of 《2025 ARKO Leap》 ©Kumho Museum of Art
Kumho Museum of Art presents 《2025 ARKO Leap》 on view through January 10,
2026. The exhibition is part of the Arts Council Korea(hereinafter called
“ARKO”)'s 2025 Regional Arts advancement support program and brings to Seoul a
group of artists recommended by fourteen regional arts and culture foundations
across the country.
This exhibition extends Kumho Museum of
Art's long-standing commitment to supporting artists working outside major
metropolitan centers. Since 1989, the museum has hosted the annual exhibition 《Today's Regional Artists》, providing a
platform for artists who had often remained on the institutional periphery and
supporting the creative foundations of regional art practices.
《2025 ARKO Leap》
carries forward the earlier 《Today's Regional Artists》 exhibitions' aim of redressing imbalance, while moving toward an
artistic ecosystem that is cyclical and reciprocal—one that does not presume a
hierarchy between center and region. With this exhibition, Kumho Museum of Art
seeks to reconsider the contemporary meaning of regional art and to broaden the
field of artistic exchange across past, present, and future as an institution
that mediates the production, circulation, criticism, and institutional support
of regional artistic practices.
This exhibition, presented throughout the
entire Kumho Museum of Art, features four solo shows by Gu Jieun, Kim Ju Hwan,
Kim Jin Hee, and Kim Hee Ra. Gu Jieun (b. 1986) presents a media
installation grounded in her long-term research tracing shifts in the habitats
of swallows, a bioindicator species for climate change, across multiple cities.
Her work imagines future ecological environments in which human and nonhuman beings
coexist.
Kim Ju Hwan (b. 1974) explores the tension between nature's primordial vitality and the
human desire to control it. Through installations marked by stark
black-and-white contrasts, he reveals the interplay between moment and
duration, emergence and disappearance. Kim Jin Hee (b. 1971) regards the
city as a landscape shaped by condensed human desire. Her paintings render
inner images where anxiety and aspiration intersect amid vertical structures
and high-rise forms.
Kim Hee Ra (b. 1970) uses textiles, thread, and everyday objects in her installations to
reflect on women's lives and social roles. With both wit and subtlety, she
exposes the power dynamics and hierarchies concealed beneath seemingly solid
worlds.
