Installation view of 《Portraits : Ourselves》 © Ranee Seoul
Ranee Seoul presents 《Portraits: Ourselves》, a group exhibition
featuring fifteen artists, on view through August 8.
The exhibition approaches portraiture as a
contemporary form of record, asking how human beings exist today amid shifting
social conditions, artistic conventions, and cultural expectations.
At the same time, portraiture expands into
a site where each artist’s gaze, sensibility, and visual language emerge with
particular intensity.
This exhibition unfolds through artistic
personas, fractured and fused selves, theatrically staged figures, portraits
constructed like diagrams of digital sensibilities and human relationships,
hybrid beings crossing the boundaries between the human and the nonhuman, and
traces left behind by memory and time.
Installation view of 《Portraits : Ourselves》 © Ranee Seoul
The first encounter is with the artist’s
persona. Faces and images of works by painters and sculptors reveal how
artistic identity is formed and represented, along with the sensibilities and
structures that shape it.
Group portraits symbolizing maternal care
and familial relationships accumulate emotional and bodily experience within
systems of signs, structures, and digital imagery, constructing human existence
as a kind of perceptual terrain.
Portraits juxtaposed through repetition,
fragmentation, and the rearrangement of images reveal the anxiety and tension
of an age shaped by replication and proliferation, suggesting that human
existence can no longer be fixed within a single stable narrative.
Figures shaped like scenes from a film,
imbued with theatrical atmosphere, alongside enlarged faces and coarse bodily
surfaces, evoke portraits placed upon a stage.
Installation view of 《Portraits : Ourselves》 © Ranee Seoul
Portraits in which humans, animals, mythic
beings, and nonhuman forms intertwine call forth unfamiliar sensations of life
beyond human-centered boundaries, while blurred faces and distorted figures
emerge as relational portraits permeated by the emotions and sensibilities of
others.
Portraits that connect life and death,
memory and time through geometric structures invite us to reconsider human
existence from a cosmic perspective, while eroded and fragmented busts quietly
confront us with traces of humanity that can never be fully defined.
Like countless cells and layers of
sensation interwoven within a living body, these diverse portraits never
converge into a single face, but offer encounters with uncertain and
irreducible reflections of ourselves.
Participating Artists: Sohee
Kim, Chansong Kim, Dennis Scholl, Dew Kim, Dirk Zoete, Sangik Seo, Younwon
Sohn, Minjeong An, Taewon Ahn, Junghwa Yang, Miryu Yoon, Younguk Yi, Jaeheon
Lee, Gyudon Janc, Seongjin Jeong
