TOUCH
An exhibition of international Korean and UK artists brought together to reflect and celebrate touch.
Curated by Stephanie Seungmin Kim
ISKAI Contemporary Art

Sleepers Summit

GALLERY46
LONDONEWCASTLE ARTS

Exhibition Dates
2nd – 9th September 2021

Thursday 2nd (Private View) | 6 – 10pm
Friday 3rd – Late opening  | 12 – 9pm

Kristina Chan
Joon Choi
Heo Dongwook
Mimi Joung
HaNuk Jung
Hayoung Kim
Sangyong Lee
Ligyung
Zoë Marden
SSKETCH
Cosimo Sturniolo
Vakki
Joao Villas
Axel Void
Koh Sang Woo
Jihyun Yu

KRISTINA CHAN
Kristina Chan’s practice explores narrative and place through printmaking, alternative photography, and sculpture.
Each work tells a story, exploring our relationship with place. Her work resides in the collections of the V&A Museum, Royal Collection Clarence House, and Ingram Collection and has been widely exhibited.  Most notably, at the Louvre Museum during the 5th Annual Exposure Award, Offprint TATE, TATE Modern, Royal Academy, KoMASK Master Printmaking Salon Antwerp, Oseana Kunst og Kultursenter Bergen, Museum für Moderne Kunst Bremen, Beers London, to name a few.Chan is a recipient of the Canadian Council for the Arts Digital Originals Innovation Grant, Ingram Prize, Queen Sonja Print Award Finalist (all 2020), and is a two-time winner of the Elizabeth Greenshield’s Foundation Grant (2017/2018).
Through her research, she learned that caves are described as alive or dead. Alive so long as they are hollowing, dead once their dimensions fix. This fascinated me, how we choose to measure growth. In this case, by its void. I learned that limestone retains light. Shine a torch through it and it will continue to glow moments after the light leaves. There is a geological and human resonance. It literally echos. These marks are measured in millennia.  We mark the world as it marks us, in layers of existence.  The land itself becomes a metaphor for the people that inhabit it.  It is a journey that is both internal and external.  And it is entirely consuming.

JOON CHOI
Joon Choi was born in Seoul, 1952, educated at  Joongang university  in Korea and the Nihon university in Japan. He  went to New York and was an assistant to Ormond Gigly, and Genald Zanetti.  After coming back to Korea, he has dominated the highly demanding world of advertising industry in Korea  for nearly 30years, winning several top awards including the grandprix at 2006 tvcf advertising Award with Sk telecom commercial entitled Hero. He has become one of the most revered Korean photographers since the ground-breaking exhibition BACKJAE 2006,  the portraiture of the artifacts and national treasures dating back 2000 years to the Three Kingdom period of Korea. Having exhibited at UNESCO(The mother of sea HAEYNEO) 2015 in Paris, the World Economic Forum in Switzerland, and several national art galleries in Japan, China, and Korea, he has successfully transformed himself into an artist.

MIMI JOUNG
Mimi Joung, originally from Korea, gained her Masters in Ceramics and Art from the Royal College of Art.  Much of Mimi’s works are installation and situation/relational projects. They are suggestive of landscapes and stories, combining clay or glass sometimes bundled together with mundane, found materials such as elastic bands, knitting wool, silk thread, a needle box, objects found in charity shops, the natural environment or through people and conversations. She focuses her work on issues of “Displacement”, with objects addressing a wider discourse, beyond origin and usage, to reference human situations and experience. She is a long way from home and the important influences there and has become a commentator, observer and historian reflecting the important cycle of roots and change.
Process is all important to the artist. Mimi’s hands instinctively seek to resolve ideas through the act of making and follow a playful approach, reflecting her own life, what she reads and what she learns from other people and situations. She feels that her comfort with materials and techniques allow her to seek a deeper meaning in the historical context of ceramic materials, forms and colour.
Recently, the artist’s work has evolved to create sculptural pieces based on a slim novel called ‘In Watermelon Sugar’ by the American writer, Richard Brautigan. Cavaliero Finn was particularly drawn to these pieces, their bright colours and playfulness.  Mimi creates these sculptures by tracing and clay taping each chapter of Brautigan’s surreal landscape which are reflections of displacement within imagined utopias and dystopias.  Each sculpture relates to a chapter in the book, featuring the exact words from Brautigan’s novel.
Mimi has been awarded membership of the Royal Society of Sculptors. She has made site specific and project-based exhibitions inspired by her interest in exploring ideas surrounding her materials (clay) and their history. She completed an Artist in Residence program at the Banff Arts Centre, Canada, which celebrates conceptual art in Canada and allows international artists to explore the future of their ideas And also received various arts grants and commission from Korea, England, Wales, and other countries.

HANUK JUNG
HaNuk Jung has completed Meisterschueler from Academy of Fine Arts Dresden successfully wit the Diplom Award. Jung has had solo exhibitions in South Korea and Germany. His group exhibitions in SeMA, Yangju City Museum, Osan Ciity Museum of Art, He is currently a Professor at Kyunghee University.
He focuses on attempting to combine the aesthetics of coexistence by replacing the originality and uniqueness of art with another uniqueness within an intersubjective interest. Among these attempts, the <Colorscape> series is in progress to create a visual system of a combined landscape that contains the intersection of the plane and the three-dimensional.
Through this, he tries to artificially combine abstraction and figuration with temporality and spatiality among the minimum elements of ‘colour’, which eliminates recognizable shapes, and focuses on producing a refined scene that does not belong to boundaries

HAYOUNG KIM
Doctor of Fine Art frm UEL, and Postgradeu from RA. Her works are included in various collections including Royal Academy of Arts, London, Jerwood gallery, Hastings, Paintings in Hospital Menier Gallery, London, and Deutsche Bank Art Collection, London
2014 Emerging Artists Program, Seoul Museum of Art
2013 WW SOLO Award 2013 longlist
2011 The Dunoyer de Segonzac award
2011 Various Small Prizes from Royal Academy
2011 Soloman J Soloman Prize
2010 Jerwood Prize, Royal Academy Schools – Major Prize
2009 The Arts Club Prize Excellence in Drawing Award 2009 -First Prize
Residency Programme
2014 Artoll artist residency programme, Bedburgh- Hau
2013 Artoll artist residency programme, Bedburgh-Hau, Germany
2011-12 LG HAZZYS AIR Arlington house, Camden, London
2011 Vytlacil AIR program (The Art Students league of New York)
2010 Glenfiddich AIR program

LIGYUNG
Successfully graduated from Chelsea College of Arts, finishing her master’s and a research program. After graduation she participated in multiple planned exhibitions and held solo exhibits at prestigious museums and galleries ranging from The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA), Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA), Art Sonje Center and Coreana Museum of Art. In Ginza Maison Hermиs le Forum, she attracted the largest number of audiences since the foundation of the establishment, and in Karlsruhe ZKM Museum of Art, she participated as a representative artist of South Korean contemporary art. Ligyung’s artistic spectrum jumps between installation art, sculpture, and plastic arts, having “light” as her recurrent theme. Her works begin from her interest in the material, “light”, which invisibility still carries a certain level of concrete mobility as can be seen in light wave or light source. The artist has devoted her career to experimenting various styles based on the peculiarity and scalability of such non-material, light. Ligyung’s installation guides the audiences to have an experience of profound contemplation.

Countertransference – Mother of pearl, 8 channel sound, PAR light, natural light installation
View – Ginza Maison Hermès Le Forum, Tokyo, 2014

ZOË MARDEN
Zoë Marden is an artist, curator and writer. She grew up in Hong Kong and is currently based in London. She works with performance, video, text, sound, sculpture and installation to create alternate worlds and speculative futures. Her work is research based and is concerned with where intersectional feminism overlaps with the post colonial. Her intimate performances play with the voice, activating soundscapes of desire and vulnerability.
Zoë is part of the CAMPerVAN collective with Samuel Doeuk and Fiontбn Moran, in which we investigate the queering of spaces through performance. The CAMPerVAN is a transportable queer performance, and LGBTQ community event space that can be deployed anywhere in the world to bring performance art, film screening, panel discussion & workshop into the public realm.
Royal College of Art, Fine Art: Moving Image MFA,  London,  2016 – 2018
Goldsmiths University, Curating MFA, London,  2012 – 2014
The American University of Paris, History of Art BFA, Paris,  2005 – 2008

KOH SANGWOO
Recognizable by the blue tone photograph that captures his subject using negative film, Koh Sang Woo is a visual artist who consolidates photography, performance, and painting. His work is a result of dialogue with the model. The Decoration of their bodies and hear with flowers and butterflies and painting them with brush strokes is a part of performance and preparation for photographing. His subjects are completely revealed, represented in their essential purity. Change of the color and the light in exposure gives them intense visual and emotional charge. Woo gives us the opportunity to see the world in reverse, to reconsider the way in which we look at others and understand ourselves.
http://kohsangwoo.com

AXEL VOID – Alejandro Hugo Dorda Mevs
Born in Miami in 1986 to a Haitian mother and a Spanish father. He was raised in Spain from the age of three, where he was strongly influenced by classical painting and drawing. Axel Void has been in contact with graffiti writing since 1999. He studied Fine Arts in Cбdiz, Granada, and Sevilla, and based himself in Berlin until moving to Miami in 2013, where he currently resides.
http://axelvoid.com

VAKKI
Vakki is an artist who explores various media including graphic design, kinetic installation, video, and interactive media. She geometrically interprets the process of moving and creating objects in a given orbit, and questions the cycle of existence through kinetic work with graphics and motility. She has been working on crossing the boundaries of diverse fields with the artist’s delightful visual language. Currently, she works in Hague and Seoul. She operates the Vavava Tamgooso, a creative studio.
http://www.playvakki.com/about/

The exhibition celebrates the spirit of Joie de vivre in the face of the pandemic, it centres on rediscovering life, touch, and colour. While not being naively optimistic, the exhibition encourages touching (each other) to reflect and celebrate. Some works are contemplative while being playful; the exhibition curator Stephanie Seungmin Kim wanted to work with artists she admires and who encapsulate the exhibition’s spirit.
The exhibition will present celebrated work from Asia, mixing mediums and senses. In the last room, there will be photographs of the “muses” that inspired the SSketch brand that will also be launched on that day.

About the Curator
Stephanie Seungmin Kim PhD. is a curator, filmmaker and producer based in London and across Asia and Europe. She is the director of Iskai Contemporary Art (iskaiart.com) and Sleepers Summit (sleeperssummit.com), which have hosted major international government-affiliated exhibitions commemorating national and international diplomacy and culture. She has also art directed the film Sleepers in Venice film and the ost album. One of the most extensive exhibition was Jikji, the Golden Seed, the title exhibition of the 1st Jikji Korea International Festival, featuring 40 artists attracted 40,000 people over eight days. Her interests in ecology also spun since early days, including Earth Alert: Photographic Responses to Climate Change (2009), Project Seoul Apparel, as a part of Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism (2017), a special exhibition marking United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD,) COP13 in Inner Mongolia (2017, Ordos)and hosted Bellong Bellong Now festival, Jeju Island (2020), consisting conference, artists residency, exhibitions, publishing, and architectural projects focusing on sustainability. Since 2005, she has directed over 90 international exhibitions, with around 500 artists in 22 cities. Collections include Sleepers in Venice (2015, Venice), Singapore Open Media Festival (2015, Singapore), Unesco Heritage, Legacy & Light (2014, Paris), A Soldier’s Tale (2013, London), Crystallize : New Media Art Lab UK for Presidential State Visit London (2013, Old Billingsgate), Liverpool Biennial City-States Terra Galaxia (2012, Liverpool)  Asia Media Landscape (2010, Liverpool), Heritage and (UNESCO, Paris) and more. Stephanie was the founding curator of the Korean Cultural Centre UK in London from 2007 to 2011. In 2004, Stephanie gained her PhD in Curatting Contemporary Art from Royal College of Art,  Masters in the History of Art from the University College London and, in 2003, a BA (Hons) in Fine and Decorative Arts at Sotheby’s Institute.

Sleepers Summit http://sleeperssummit.com
Iskai Art http://iskaiart.com
Ssketch