SEOUL
PKM Gallery
Koo Jeong A 2O2O
KOO JEONG A, Seven Stars, 2020, phosphorescent pigment and acrylic painting on canvas, 243 × 152.5 cm. Courtesy the artist and PKM Gallery, Seoul.
Duality is a dialectic often claimed by contemporary artists to characterize a broad spectrum of works that assert a coexistence of discrete sensibilities. While such sensibilities may occasionally operate in harmony, they more often compete for dominance, giving rise to cognitive dissonance that instills artworks with a compelling potency. Rarely, however, do these impulses directly contradict each other in purely antithetical terms; polarity, it would seem, is much more difficult to attain than duality. In her exhibition “2O2O,” multidisciplinary artist Koo Jeong A probed polarizing perceptions by juxtaposing several bodies of work that collectively encouraged contemplation of conceptual flip sides. Koo creates the conditions for such engagement via a manipulation of material and visibility. Upon entering PKM Gallery’s main space, viewers are confronted by ten canvases that are effectively blank. Thinly coated with patchy, monochrome beige pigment, these antipaintings project a sense of absolute minimalism that is Rymanesque in its resistance to representation. And yet, Koo’s treatment of paint is neither evocative nor inspired, leaving the works lifeless. It is only when the gallery’s white cube interior plunges into darkness every 12 minutes that the conceit of these canvases becomes apparent: they glow in the dark. Koo’s Seven Stars (2020) paintings REVIEWS
do more than just emit a phosphorescent glow, however; they challenge viewers’ visual perception in an unsettling fashion. The artist’s use of a reverse stencil technique in these works renders the irregular five-pointed stars that sparsely populate each canvas as negatives, their outlined silhouettes lacking any substance within. The misaligned layering of stencils here creates an uncanny sense of catching convergent shadows cast by nonexistent star-shaped objects hovering in the darkened gallery. Invisible except in darkness, depicting not images but their inverse, and projecting invisible masses beyond the picture plane itself, these paintings stand in sharp contrast to conventional conceptions of the medium. Elsewhere in the exhibition, ten miniature works on paper operate as polar opposites of Koo’s glow-in-the-dark paintings. These works from Koo’s drawing series Your Tree My Answer (2020) are all variations on a single theme: black line drawings on rice paper depicting gnarled and knotted trees that extend slender, bare branches, terminating in pools of black ink resembling soot-stained cotton balls. The natural fibers of their substrate lend these works an overt tactility, while their scale—each barely larger than a business card— imbues them with an intimacy that encourages close-up examination, all qualities notably absent from Seven Stars. It was a group of site-specific sculptures, however, that cemented the undercurrent of polarity prevalent throughout the exhibition. Koo has long been interested in magnets artasiapacific.com
as a sculptural medium, both in terms of their conceptual potential as well as their physical properties. Composed of modular one-centimeter cubes of ferrite magnets, these simplistic sculptures assume various impermanent forms—a line, a plane, an architectural model—subject to alteration at any point by the artist. The only defining characteristic that distinguishes these works is the number of cubes each contains, allowing for their potential to be reassembled in an infinite number of configurations. Here, Koo’s sculptures invert the parameters of sculpture as such, a medium premised upon the relative consistency of three-dimensional physical forms, and lay claim to a mode of classification based on a work’s constituent units rather than its appearance. As an apt symbol for Koo’s practice, magnets also manifest an inherent polarity that energizes them with an unseen yet constant force that is visible only when certain conditions are met. During her career of nearly three decades, “2O2O” was only the artist’s second solo exhibition in Seoul. Notwithstanding, Koo’s enduring belief that “nothing is merely ordinary” struck home in this exhibition, where the interplay of contrasting elements resolved into an extraordinary feat of oscillational expression and an exercise in liminal cognition. A N DY S T. L O U I S
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