Installation view of 《White Sneakers: Death Is Fine But Then There Is No Love》 © Kumho Museum of Art
Kumho Museum of Art presents 《2026 KUMHO YOUNG ARTIST Part.2》 on view
through May 31.
“KUMHO YOUNG ARTIST” program, launched with
its first open call in 2004, has supported a total of 107 emerging artists to
date by providing opportunities for solo exhibitions. This year’s selected
artists are Gang Donghoon, Moon Joohye, Hyunjin Park, Seo Wonmi, Soojung Jung,
and Jiwon Choi. The second part of the exhibition presents solo shows by
Soojung Jung, Hyunjin Park, and Jiwon Choi.
1. Soojung Jung (b. 1990), 《White Sneakers: Death Is Fine But Then There Is No Love》
Soojung Jung creates paintings that depict
unfamiliar yet strangely familiar worlds imagined from reality. She
deconstructs and reconstructs images drawn from a wide range of narratives,
including adventure stories, myths, films, documentaries, animation, and music
videos. Within her canvases—filled with vivid colors and dense brushwork—the
boundaries between figures and backgrounds blur, expanding into open-ended
narratives that resist fixed meanings.
In this exhibition, the artist juxtaposes
personal experiences of death with events unfolding in contemporary society,
presenting scenes where life and death intersect. In her large-scale work
White Sneakers (2026), spanning 10 meters in width, figures
and elements of nature collide and surge toward one another, generating a
dynamic landscape in which urgent moments—where life and death cross
paths—unfold across the surface.
Through these scenes, Jung does not
position death as the opposite of life, but rather invites us to see it as
another force of movement operating from within life itself.
Installation view of 《Echo Tracks》 © Kumho Museum of Art
2. Hyunjin Park (b. 1991), 《Echo Tracks》
Hyunjin Park explores the ways in which
humans, animals, plants, and machines form relationships through a variety of
media. Reflecting on the memories, emotions, and bonds that persist even after
the death of her longtime companion dog “Bbo Bbo,” she has been engaged with
the possibility of existence continuing in different forms, even after the
disappearance of a physical body.
Currently working on a project based on
life with a robotic dog named “Echo,” the artist presents in this exhibition
her experience of forming a team with Echo to perform agility exercises,
expressed through sculpture, installation, video, and sound.
Although Echo, as a robotic dog, cannot
fully conform to the rules of agility—which presuppose responsiveness and
mutual attunement—the artist continues to call out to and train the robot.
Sculptures borrowing the forms of agility equipment are installed in the space
like traces of a hollow training process, resonating without response.
Through this, Park raises questions that
extend from the long history of humans domesticating animals to the present
moment of forming relationships with AI robotic dogs—asking what it is that we
bring into being and nurture.
Installation view of 《Glazed Fever》 © Kumho Museum of Art
3. Jiwon Choi (b. 1996), 《Glazed Fever》
Jiwon Choi focuses on smooth, decorative
objects to depict scenes where beauty and tension coexist. She places porcelain
dolls—originally produced in 19th-century Europe—within unfamiliar contexts,
prompting them to be perceived as estranged objects. In this exhibition, the
artist magnifies the doll’s face to an overwhelming scale, drawing attention to
the latent heat concealed beneath the hard, glazed surface of porcelain.
She expands this sense of “heat” into an
emotional temperature generated by obsession and desire toward a given object.
The orchids that fill the canvas embody the history of such desire. Referencing
the phenomenon of “orchid fever” in 19th-century Britain, she imagines women
within the Victorian era—when orchid collecting reached a frenzy—gazing at and
possessing these flowers.
Between the juxtaposed porcelain doll and
orchid within the frame, viewers are confronted with intertwined histories of
beauty, desire, and the gaze that seeks to behold and possess them.
Participating Artists: Soojung
Jung, Hyunjin Park, Jiwon Choi
