Installation view of 《Subversive Play of Inner Turmoil》 ©GalleryMEME
GalleryMEME presents the group exhibition 《Subversive Play of Inner Turmoil》 through
March 25, featuring works by five women artists from Korea and Japan.
The five participating artists embrace
tenderness and strangeness, desire and anxiety, waging their own battles in
discord with the world in order not to resemble anyone else. Within their
canvases, distortions, discomfort, and rebellious—seemingly subversive—emotions
paradoxically weave together dazzling landscapes.
At the boundary where pain and pleasure
meet, these scenes remain at once frightening and beautiful, impossible to turn
away from. 《Subversive Play of Inner Turmoil》 presents the distinct attitudes and perspectives each artist has
chosen upon that unstable threshold.
Installation view of 《Subversive Play of Inner Turmoil》 ©GalleryMEME
Jung Soojung unfolds
worlds drawn from nature, literature, and myth with dynamic vitality, filling
her landscapes with sensations as vivid and uncanny as those experienced in
dreams. Through her distinctive visual language, she reinterprets narratives
that challenge the hierarchies between nature and civilization, the boundaries
between imagination and reality, and the limits of desire and convention.
Choi Namu explores how
moments of anxiety and pain alter the surface of the body. The works presented
in this exhibition are part of her new series ‘Intruder,’ initiated in 2025,
which addresses not only external attacks but also internal transformations and
the modes of self-defense that arise in response.
Lee Eunkyong depicts a
gaze that does not turn away from anxiety but confronts it directly. In her
self-portrait series, figures appear on the canvas either swollen or contracted
under extreme tension. At the point where the repressed interior collides with
the outwardly revealed self, the artist records this division with a gaze that
is both quiet and resolute.
Installation view of 《Subversive Play of Inner Turmoil》 ©GalleryMEME
Enomoto Mariko unfolds
memories and emotions accumulated within the female psyche through the format
of portraiture. The recurring figures in her works function as devices that
connect past and present, summoning onto the canvas memories and feelings that
resist easy verbal explanation.
Nakabayashi Arisa
reflects on the position of human beings and the structures of relationships
through the forms of nature. In compositions where plants and human figures
overlap, she evokes the condition of those who have lost their place of
belonging or have been excluded, borrowing the body of nature to raise
questions about center and periphery, inclusion and exclusion.
Participating Artists: Nakabayashi
Arisa, Enomoto Mariko, Choi Namu, Lee Eunkyong, Jung Soojung
