Issy Wood

이시 우드 Issy Wood, 포르쉐 드라이버 스타터 팩 Porsche driver starter pack, 2023, Oil on linen, 21×30×2cm. 사진 제공: 일민미술관, © Issy Wood, 2023; courtesy the Artist; Carlos/Ishikawa, London; and Michael Werner Gallery, New York. Photographer: Damian Griffiths

Ilmin Museum of Art (Director Kim Taeryung) holds I Like To Watch from September 7th to November 12th. This exhibition is the first presentation of Issy Wood (b. 1993) in Korea who lives and works in London, featuring 47 new paintings, as well as installations, video works, and publications. Through ominously represented worlds, Wood captures a contemporary world where everything is just fine yet chaotic. Wood obsessively observes and paints vintage objects, young people’s fetishized luxuries, sexual metaphors, and unusual moments in her own life. Wood’s surfaces, imbued with dark and coarse humor, symbolize today’s anxiety, where the booming consumer industry tempting the young generation, the fear of low wages and get-rich-quick mentality, and various radicalisms and far-right discourses subtly intermingle. All the while utilizing motifs rooted in the traditions of Western art history.

이시 우드 Issy Wood, 봐 엄마, 충치 없어 Look Ma, no cavities, 2023, Oil on velvet, 120×265×6cm. 사진 제공: 일민미술관, © Issy Wood, 2023; courtesy the Artist; Carlos/Ishikawa, London; and Michael Werner Gallery, New York. Photographer: Damian Griffiths

As a contemporary painting, Wood’s work is a precursor to a new realism that combines surrealism. Wood delicately addresses the potential of symbols in saturated objects and events. However, where Surrealism generally concentrates on the subjective unconscious that dominates the speaker’s inner life, Wood depicts symbols found everywhere in reality with a more dispassionate attitude. Wood invokes the classical forms of art history─medieval, baroque, and neoclassicism─in an excessively wide range, and is thus driven not by a concealed unconscious or mysticism, but by a fascination with the excess of objects and events. This observation and analysis process, akin to writing, projects a first-person psychological perspective, as implied by the exhibition title I Like To Watch. Wood’s use of blogging, composing, and directing music videos as narrative substructures supports the scenes of her paintings, reminiscent of a faint dream or lucid dreaming.

이시 우드 Issy Wood, 그렇게 들었습니다 Or so I’ve heard, 2023, Oil on linen, 120×270.5×5cm. 사진 제공: 일민미술관, © Issy Wood, 2023; courtesy the Artist; Carlos/Ishikawa, London; and Michael Werner Gallery, New York. Photographer: Damian Griffiths

This exhibition is an extension of the first half of the exhibition Hysteria: Contemporary Realism Painting and explores the tides of contemporary painting. Wood’s use of reality opens up new possibilities for painting that address issues of form and representation. In terms of painting, Wood extensively refers to historical European figurative painting, technically blurring the picture and maintaining a constant illumination as if a filter were used, and using thick textured velvet as a base for her paintings to create a distinctive anachronistic atmosphere. This way of digesting the immediacy of painting is a significant recent trend in art, leading to an interest in the reinterpretation of painting as a medium of the times, as well as a study of the relationship and status of objects and events within and outside of painting. Ilmin Museum of Art will explore these trends and explore challenges and experiments on the front lines of art with domestic and international audiences.

이시 우드Issy Wood, 무제(지금 방식) Untitled (How now), 2023, Oil on linen, 175×215×5cm. 사진 제공: 일민미술관, © Issy Wood, 2023; courtesy the Artist; Carlos/Ishikawa, London; and Michael Werner Gallery, New York. Photographer: Damian Griffiths

A series of associated programmes will be held in conjunction with the exhibition. An “Opening Reception” will be held on Tuesday, 5 September at 5 PM, and an “Artist Talk” will be held on Friday, 8 September at 4 PM, featuring Issy Wood (participating artist), Yoon Juli (Chief Curator of Ilmin Museum of Art), and Kim Sungwoo (Director of Primary Practice). In October, the humanities programme “Translator’s Note 28” is scheduled. For a total of 57 days, I Like To Watch will be closed every Monday and Chuseok, and a docent programme will be held on Fridays and Sundays at 3 PM for on-site applicants

Ilmin Museum of Art

152 Sejongdaero, Jongno-gu, Seoul, Korea
82-2-2020-2050

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