Objemage(Objet+Image) : Postcard
GalleryMEME
1 day left
Objemage(Objet+Image) : Postcard
GalleryMEME
1 day left
Kwon Dae Hun’s Inclusive Theory of Formative Art: Save the Forms (救像)!
Kwon Dae Hun positions images from various sources within meticulously orchestrated light settings, creating new contexts that transform them. Drawings acquire physicality through his masterful modeling techniques, embodying forms illuminated by both the virtual light of an image and tangible light from real sources. This dual interplay between types of illumination playfully restores analog processes being, or already, replaced by digital methods. His inspirations come not from big data but from personal experience and memory, expressed through traditional, labor-intensive techniques like modeling and painting.
Kwon Dae Hun navigates seamlessly across boundaries of memory and the present, light and shadow, reality and virtuality, sculpture and painting. Memory becomes incarnate under his skilled hands, materialized into form. On these manifestations of memory, he orchestrates the embodiment of light itself. This dual materialization forms a unique visual grammar, shaping and directing the sensory experience of his world, where multiple narratives come to life, stretching and unfolding.
Visual art has long been a conduit for presenting standards of supreme excellence absent from the mundane world—carriers of inspiration, light from distant realms, sublimity, and grace. These were vectors aiming toward a transcendent realm beyond subjective viewpoints. However, in the wake of deconstruction and waves of postmodern fragmentation, art has become a battleground of broken signifier-signified chains, a chaos where reality intermingles with rootless symbols, reducing images to orphans adrift in a world of meaninglessness. Art has devolved into a herald of confusion, arbitrariness, and ugliness devoid of perspective or purpose.
Kwon Dae Hun’s sculptures serve as a manifesto for rethinking sculpture itself. By embracing both the traditional and the nontraditional, and by interweaving the sculptural and the non-sculptural, he seeks to revitalize the essence of sculpture. His work does not negate or dismantle reality or imagery, nor does it harbor hostility toward non-sculptural elements. Instead, it integrates fiction as a means of expanding truth and rescues images from the mire of meaninglessness. In this way, he moves toward a detoxified modernist aesthetic, reclaiming the potential of form. This approach defines both the direction and significance of his practice.
by Shim Sangyong (Director, Seoul National University Museum of Arts)