SPACE November 2025 (No. 696)
Exhibition view of Nayoungim & Gregory Maass’s section
Exhibition view of featuring works by Oksun Kim, Kim Jipyeong, and Ha Cha Youn at the second floor
The exhibition ‘Undoing Oneself’, which shone a light five mid-career artists (or teams) – Kang Hong-goo, Nayoungim & Gregory Maass, Oksun Kim, Kim Jipyeong, and Ha Cha Youn – was on show at the ARKO Art Center until the 26th of October. ‘Undoing Oneself’ is part of the programme that highlights mid-career artists, a culmination of Arts Council Korea’s Mid-Career Artist Support Project and Artist Research-Study-Critique Support Project. The exhibition explores the paths of these mid-career artists, tracing how they engage in acts of self-critique and self-reference as they articulate their artistic worldview. What does it mean for artists who have achieved their own unique visual language to revisit the past? How does it reveal to move from one’s past self to their present self? SPACE looked into the meaning of such a curatorial strategy and the methodologies that informed this exhibition, which sought to capture the practice and process of an art that oscillates between critique and practice.
Kang Hong-goo, Who am I 10, 1998, digital compositing, digital c-print, 40.5×60cm.
Left: Kang Hong-goo, Fugitive 1, 1996, digital compositing, digital c-print, 126×200cm. Right: Kang Hong-goo, Daikon and Rice Bowl, 1992, mixed media on canvas, 150×180cm.
What is Retrospective, Anachronistic, and Past
When reconstructing the work of artists who have reached a certain point in their trajectory and attained a sense of completion in their own visual language, curators must take a detoured approach. This is because the meaning and narrative weight of the artis...
