Opening - Chopping Play: Korean Contemporary Art Now @ ION

A new Korean art exhibition, Chopping Play – Korean Contemporary Art Now, will run at ION Gallery Feb 12-20. It brings together six very different Korean artists, working with 3D photo sculptures (Gwon Osang), ceramics (Yee SooKyung), oil paintings (Chung SueJin) and Korean ink (Son Donghyun).  Korean art is extremely hot right now, and still under-appreciated by many collectors. Hot on the heels of the Korean Eye exhibition last year, it’s another opportunity to learn more about Korean contemporary art. As the exhibition title Chopping Play suggests, the participating artists dis-assemble and then, re-assemble the physical, spatial, and temporal elements, thereby transforming what was. My favourite is Gwon Osang who constructs a solid figure with two-dimensional photographs. He takes photographs of parts of the human body, and then attaches those photographs onto the surface of the figure. He also sometimes cuts out images from advertisements, and then reassembles them in a dramatically different landscape. One of his large work, a policeman on a horse, is currently showing at SAM, as part of the Collectors Stage show.