Jang Yongsun, Captivating Ruins, 2020 ‒ 2021 ⓒBang Yukyung
According to what criteria are nature and objects selected and discarded in the city? The exhibition ‘Beyond the City Lights’, currently held at the Kumho Museum of Art, tells the story of five artists who pay attention to the alienated and disappearing beings of a human-made city. Um A Long, who experiences frequent moves, focuses on humans, animals and plants that have lost their habitat and are forced to migrate. ‘Move and Move’ (2020), an installation work that prints images of people, houses, animals and plants and attaches them to steel pipe posts, metaphorically reveals the situation of these beings in that they are assembled, disassembled, and reassembled depending on the situation. Jang Yongsun, who has been working with grass and seeds weeded as part of the urban aesthetics project, highlights the value and aesthetics of life that silently disappear by the artwork, Captivating Ruins (2020 ‒ 2021), made with woven foxtails and Treasure-the Seed collection (2016 ‒ 2021), which collects seeds of unknown wild grasses. Song Zoohyeong’s video work, which projects the natural landscape on waste plastic and the landscape of the city and nature onto the window frame of a building, provides a space and time in which to contemplate the artificial environment created by the city. Kim Hyejung, who started painting animals after adopting an abandoned dog, expanded her interest in animal welfare and environmental issues and delivered a message about ‘coexistence’ through the monologues of animals in the paintings. Yoon JeongMee presented the Animal Companions (2008 ‒ 2015) series, which photographed single-person households living with companion animals, and Old Animal Laboratory (2016), which snapped an exhibition space once used as an animal laboratory. These works reveal contradictory views of humans towards animals. This exhibition, which draws attention to unintentional excess, will be on show until Aug. 15.