Lagrange Point: Kim Sang Gyun, Suzanne Song

Gallery Baton is pleased to announce a two-person exhibition Lagrange Point with Kim Sang Gyun and Suzanne Song, from 19 April to 20 May in the Hannam-dong space.
 
The exhibition includes a series of relieves of Kim Sang Gyun, who has drawn primary qualities of architecture to the sculpture genre, and the multimedia practice of Suzanne Song, who has represented ‘spaces’ in the realm of perception with her illusionistic style. The exhibition title refers to what it ideally aims at, considering that Lagrange Point stands for 'gravitational equilibria spots' where the gravitational forces of two large bodies (in the most representative case, the sun and the earth) and the centrifugal force balance each other in terms of celestial mechanics; it offers an intriguing opportunity to witness how the works of two different artists establish a complementary relation despite maintaining each particular context. Especially it shows how Song’s recognition and awareness of time and space within her chronicle blend in with the macroscopic time and space selectively described by Kim through the adoption and montage of historic architectural relics: how these different methodologies produce a certain context and harmoniously occupy the shared space. 

Kim Sang Gyun (b. 1967) reinterprets the zeitgeist and hegemony loaded in contemporary urban buildings reminiscent of the past. His two-and-three-dimensional works based on the early 20th-century imperial architectural modes subtly reveal discourses on post-colonial issues—the philosophical keynote of his practice. Throughout the phases of adopting façade shapes in the imperialist style to make concrete panels, dividing them into minimum units and recombining them, Kim finds unique figures whose high-relief and low-relief status coexist. Thus, Kim dissembles the identities specific buildings had in the past and refuses their given authority to illuminate the history of the hybrid.

His sculptures, combining contemporary architectural elements with façades of historical buildings, deal with humane wishes and desires steadily casting over the beginning of the globalization that the great powers brought after the pre-modern era. The materials he often employs, for example, grout, urethane resin, and stainless steel, are vital for Industrialization and Postmodern architecture. By borrowing their properties and appearances, Kim reminds the viewers of not only the disappeared past but hidden sides of the current societies built through the constant oversetting of the last vestiges in a sequent and selected order. Compared to his monotone works, whose fragmental grouts accumulate, presented in his solo exhibition, <Re: Masonry>, in 2018, it is evident that the new series has a vertical structure like a steeple and colored relieves resisting a sense of flatness. His prior works had exposed their original intact material, whereas, in the ‘Pattern Column’ series, he stacks up painting-like layers with the repetitive manoeuvre. The color layers upon layers permeating into apocryphal infinite frameworks ultimately create a new aesthetic order in which his subjective and objective perspectives overlay.

Suzanne Song (b. 1974) explores ’space’ as a nonmaterial being and a conceptual object. Once she specifically constructs a place in her conceptual territory and alters them into targets of representation, she develops her painting and installation with restrained lines and colors. Transfiguring the two-dimensional into the multi-dimensional state within her abstract paintings in geometric forms, Song has sought to investigate the notion of duality that derives from the niche between cognition and reality. To trigger continual interaction of the figurative factors, Song applies diverse visual approaches that underline media’s physical traits, including Trompe-l’oeil.

Suzanne Song achieves her delicate aesthetics by playing variations of  the fundamentals of painting—colors, textures, and shapes. These formative features occupying a canvas with a balanced formation enhance the tense dynamics between space and space, lines and faces, and verticals and horizontals. Her atypical canvas series is an outcome of her commitment to separating vacant spaces in her works and shifting them into a new form of sense over several years. Her recent series, emphasizing minimalistic sides along with the rigidity of geometry in a sophisticated attitude, carefully projects light and color onto the space of a canvas. Keeping her position on an interface where the borderline of the interior and exterior and the real and fiction is uncertain, Song addresses a question about the relationship between what art attempts to manifest and the actual world rather than being satisfied with the institutional definition of painting. Moreover, the visual sequences of <Cast I, II, III, IV> and the optical effect of <Three Points I, II> demonstrate the possibility of painting allowing in-depth reflections on various narratives to appear despite the physical circumstance.