until 29.01. | #3244ARTatBerlin | Galerie Z22 presents from 20th November 2021 the exhibition Pictoral Narrative with paintings by the Korean artist Hyeja. On display are fantastic reflections of a big city on canvas.
“As if in the beginning, the universe has been doing life activities finding order in the formless chaos and rules in the unpredictable nature, I paint as an act of seeking order and breathing in the chaos of the city. To me, painting is a space where I sometimes get lost the way and wander off about where I am, where I am going, what I see and what is visible, but at the same time, thinking space that enables me to return to everyday life and a space for life activities that generates a new source of creation by concentrating on the innermost self again.”
I first came to Berlin to participate in the International Artist Residency Program in 2011 with the support of Arts Council Korea. Because it was my first overseas experience, I always used to get lost by communication difficulties, so I have vivid memories of returning to the studio based on the images I remember, focusing on what I see and what is visible more sensitively.
Since then, I have been working between Seoul and Berlin, and thanks to the rapidly expanding network, the environment to live and work in Berlin when I lived again in 2017 has got used to and convenient. But I still collect the everyday landscapes I experience as objects of memory and observation at the boundary between the live of traveler and resident, and work based on them.
My mobile phone is full of images that I encounter on the park promenade, the scenery of the moment I accidentally stop while riding a bicycle, the night street, the reflection on the water, the train station, etc. These are unspecified moments that are momentarily stand and captured in an urban space that has no direction and is a moving desire and chaos itself. Sometimes with joy and vitality, sometimes with fear, confusion, tension and isolation, those are like records on the memories of familiarity and unfamiliarity. Some are deleted, some are posted, and some are stored in certain folders without promise.
Just as memories reflecting individual desires are stored, deleted, exchanged, and edited on the spot in digital tools in modern society, I scroll through images for several times I have stored in that way and extract the fragments, and then reconstruct them to paint. There are no separate norms or restrictions to collage and montage their different spaces and times in there. So, the places in the artworks become more than places, and the images captured in everyday landscapes are related to the sense of life that includes both reality and illusion beyond the daily life.
The narrative “Narrative” that comes from the Latin “narrare” meaning “to prove the existence that I am alive” is a series of real or fictional events rather than “story”, and is a concept that includes both reality and fantasy. My artworks are kinds of visual variations on an uncertain life out of the context in which the boundaries between reality and fantasy, between the past, present and future are ambiguous. Thus, it is “Pictorial Narrative” in which the wonder and futility experienced by endlessly moving back and forth between fragments and aggregations on the life are embodied in a new whole.”
Hyeja, 2021
Vernissage: Saturday, 20th November 2021, 7:00 – 10:00 pm
Exhibition period: Saturday, 20th November – Saturday, 29th January 2022
To the Gallery
Image caption title: Courtesy of Galerie Z22, Hyeja
Exhibition Hyeja – Galerie Z22 | Contemporary Art – Zeitgenössische Kunst in Berlin – ART at Berlin