2023. 2. 28 – 3. 25
Wonwoo Lee

PKM Gallery is pleased to present Wonwoo Lee’s solo exhibition, YOUR BEAUTIFUL FUTURE for the first exhibition of 2023. This exhibition is taking place in six years after his previous solo show How’s the weather tomorrow? in 2017 at PKM Gallery. YOUR BEAUTIFUL FUTURE integrates Lee’s past and recent works, including new sculptures which present meaningful words and materiality and performance video records over the past five years, and a worktable with a collection of the artist’s creations during his transition phase.

Wonwoo Lee’s idea is to freshen up our daily life by giving out light cracks into familiar reality with his own code of humor and irony found in life through variable working media. YOUR BEAUTIFUL FUTURE portrays the artist’s desire to offset the anxiety of an uncertain future with laughter. It aims to temporarily make us laugh who are controlled by stereotypes and swept away by the trend bandwagon to the extreme, through unexpected jokes.

The swollen Fat coke series visualizes the carbonated bubbles from cola cans that are commonly found in our surroundings. The addition of ‘diet’ in Fat coke (Diet) creates humor by deluding consumers into thinking it is not harmful for the body, playing on the contrasts between expansion and reduction, and harmlessness and harmfulness. The Heavy light series includes a heavy stone with ‘light’ written on it, a precariously standing ‘balance’ rock, and a ‘candy’ stone that seems to taste bitter, expressing the paradoxical idea that laughter comes only after destruction and illogic. Made of mobile wheels and aluminum, If you’re happy and you know it then your face will surely show it crosses a solemn white cube with its stark and cold appearance. These sculptures, also referred to as ‘comedians’ by the artist,
inject small flaws into the ordinary system, triggering an intangible sense of pleasure.

In the Air words series, poetic texts float across a flat surface. The artist delivers short stories of a day or a week using phrases like ‘THE SUN IS AN ORANGE’ ‘HONEY I’M HOME’ ‘EVENING AIR’ ‘SATURDAY MOOD’ and conveys the speed and mood of each season through a specific phrase such as ‘SPRING JUMP’ ‘SUMMER DANCE’ ‘FALL FLASH’ ‘WINTER CAKE’. This provides the audience with an experience of genuinely imagining individual feelings in the moment, the day, and the season. The series includes the phrase ‘YOUR BEAUTIFUL FUTURE’ which is also the title of the exhibition and
the recent performance. The exhibition also features records of the artist’s audience-engaged performances, from the temporary operating center for finding lost items in the past to the event that presented a beautiful future, summarized and introduced as video archives or the Dreamy Museum series. Featuring major works by Lee, this show invites to a space where intensity fades away and fresh air blows.

Wonwoo Lee majored in sculpture at Hongik University in Korea and Royal College of Art in UK, and later participated in numerous solo exhibitions, group exhibitions, and projects by leading local and international art institutions such as Seoul Museum of Art (Seoul, Korea), Amorepacific Museum of Art (Seoul, Korea), Art Sunje Center (Seoul, Korea), Alternative Space LOOP (Seoul, Korea), CYLINDER (Seoul, Korea), Songzhuang Art Museum (Beijing, China), and Korean Cultural Centre UK (London, UK). He also performed as Hyundai Motor Group ZER01NE 2020 Creator (2020), National
Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Goyang Residence Artist (2019), Seoul Museum of Art 7th Nanji ResidenceArtist (2012-2013), and is currently working actively as a member of the project group ‘MLH(2018-)’ and ‘…Joketta Project(2015-)’

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