Art Busan 2023: Future Booth

Future Booth

'FUTURE' a special sector spotlighting on young galleries established in five years or less. Each participating gallery will showcase a solo exhibition by an up-and-coming artist from its program. It became a trend for young collectors to stop by at the FUTURE sector, as many of the artists presented here are featured with exhibition opportunities at major galleries and institutions in the following years. In the 2023 edition of Art Busan, 7 participating galleries present eye-catching works by Jeongsu Woo, YISLOW, Gwangsoo Park, Cécile Lempert, Daniel Boyd, Alexey and Anton Tvorogov, and Eunjeong Choi.

BB&M

Established in 2009 as an art consultancy, BB&M’s iteration as an independent gallery since 2021 continues its mission of representing and exhibiting leading contemporary artists in an international context.

Participating Artist: Jeongsu Woo

Jeongsu Woo (b. 1986) deploys motifs and signifiers from various cultural strata to portray the multiple facets of contemporaneity with his unique visual language. Major exhibitions include Young Korean Artists, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA), 2021, and the 12th Gwangju Biennale, 2018. His work is held by MMCA, among other public collections.

CDA

CDA opened in Seoul, Korea 2021, combines the ‘Creation,’ ‘Discovery,’ and ‘Appreciation.’ The first goal is to shed light on the creative activities of various contemporary visual arts fields. We sincerely hope our activities will be a meaningful spark for creators (artists) and an opportunity for visitors to expand their inspiration and collect.

Participating Artist: YISLOW

YISLOW focuses on various relationships that form human life. However, characteristics of YISLOW’s world of art does not limit its subject of the relationship to humans but includes abstract realms such as time, incident, objects, or even oneself. By heaping disordered lines and colors that bloom from the heart, the artist tries to capture the undefinable infinite image like the random atypical humming that vanishes in her work.

Hakgojae Gallery

Hakgojae Gallery has explored and suggested directions of how Korean art should harmonize and grow in contemporary art culture. The name derived from the word ‘Hak-Go-Chang-Shin,’ which translates to ‘to review the old and learn the new.’ Hakgojae Gallery hopes to gather the old and new, connecting the region to the world.

Participating Artist: Gwangsoo Park

Gwangsoo Park focuses on the theme of ‘disappearance.’ In his works, the human-like shapes permeated into leaves and branches. Humans became a part of nature and the boundary between these two becomes ambiguous, which also means his artwork has no borderline between life and death. Vanishing; the death is not an end to Park. It is an inspiration for new life and creation. He visually expresses a circulation of vanishing and re-appearance.

IAH

IAH develops independent exhibitions committed to dis-covering and incubating emerging artists inter-nationally as creating a launchpad for visual art to follow, collect and enjoy.

Participating Artist: Cécile Lempert

Quiet, contemplative paintings of Cecile Lempert with delicate color and a touch of distemper invite viewers into personal memory, delousing through a drift of loss in time. Lempert's dear perspective is absorbed onto the surface, reminiscing the venerability of living and comforting rigid stillness of mundane weariness.

KUKJE GALLERY

Celebrating its 40th anniversary, Kukje Gallery was founded in 1982 in Seoul by Hyun-Sook Lee. Since its inception, the gallery has established itself as a vital cultural hub, introducing works by major international artists including Louise Bourgeois and Ugo Rondinone to local audiences, and promoting Dansaekhwa along with Korea’s foremost artists such as Wook-kyung Choi and Haegue Yang. In 2020, the gallery reopened its K1 building, a multi-use arts complex including gallery spaces, a café and restaurant, and a wellness center, facilitating as an “open space” that broadens the spectrum of art.

Participating Artist: Daniel Boyd

Daniel Boyd (b. 1982, born in Cairns, Australia) engages with his Aboriginal heritage by consistently reinterpreting established perspectives of Australian colonial history. The artist’s paintings are covered with clear white dots of glue, which are superimposed onto images of icons that played significant roles in the formation of the nation’s history. In each painting, a dot acts as a “lens” through which the artist views the world. Using a technique that borrows from Australian Aboriginal dot painting, these numerous lenses facilitate the artist to read the world as multiple thistories, as opposed to a singular narrative.

Lazy Mike

The paintings of Alexey and Anton Tvorogov, presented at Lazy Mike gallery’s booth, resemble cartoon fragments or a puppet show. The gallery’s booth presents a fairy tale, where besides an entertaining story, the artists bring to the forefront the sensitive relationship of the main characters with the world around them. It is as if we are being told a fairy tale, only the plot constantly eludes us, dissolving in everyday unremarkable events. Using the languages of animation, comics, book illustrations and puppet shows, the artists with their love for simplicity create a world open to interpretation, where the ordinary becomes a fabulous motive and a source of deep connection with reality.

Participating Artists: Alexey and Anton Tvorogov

Gallery Luan&Co.

Gallay Luan & Co will continue to focus on discovering promising artists, serving as an incubator to help them grow as artists, promoting contemporary art to the public and actively seeking out collectors.