Installation view of 《VESTIGES: The Ways Things Remain》 © Ranee Seoul
Ranee Seoul presents a two-person exhibition 《VESTIGES: The Ways Things Remain》 by Shinoh Nam and Wonhae Hwang, on view through November 27.
Time does not carry everything away with it. An unexpected
distortion arises between what we see and what we believe we know: the past
arrives as a substance more vivid than memory, while the tangible object before
us arrives, oddly, as an unfamiliar emotion.
《VESTIGES》, a two-person exhibition by Wonhae Hwang and Shinoh Nam, begins
with the city's images and objects removed from their original contexts. Where
Hwang translates the sensations of the city into abstract scenes through
layered, blurred fields of painting, Nam relocates and combines old objects,
drawing unexpected relationships out of familiar things.
Installation view of 《VESTIGES: The Ways Things Remain》 © Ranee Seoul
The moment the two bodies of work meet, the boundaries between
flatness and volume, between past and present, begin to blur, and different
movements are set in motion. Hwang's unhurried, flowing paintings expand into
spatial depth, while Nam's tightly composed material scenes turn toward the
realm of emotion and sensation.
“Vestiges: the traces and remnants” left behind by what came
before. Yet what this exhibition asks is not the existence of the past itself,
but the form in which it exists now. Lingering as afterimages of the city, as
objects made unfamiliar, or as sensations and emotions that resist explanation,
these remains take on the present once again within the two artists' work.
《VESTIGES》 thus reveals
the way that what remains, remains—at once a stage with its intervening scenes
omitted and a single time and space formed where the city's inside and outside
overlap.
