2021. 8. 19 – 10. 9
Eun Chun, Hyunsung Kim

PIBI GALLERY presents PIBI_LINK with artists Eun Chun and Hyunsung Kim from August 19th to October 9th, 2021. The exhibition will bring together a young metal artist, Kim, forging a colorful artistic realm ranging from cutlery to large-scale furniture and objects, with photographer Eun Chun, an artist who captures synesthetic imagery within a photographic frame.

PIBI_LINK is a program that connects artists producing disparate works through a joint show, starting with the exhibition in 2018 of Seungil Chung and Taewoo Kim, who showed differing approaches and interpretations regarding gallery space. The second installment followed in 2020, inviting past and future artists of PIBI to participate with works stripped of any themes, genres, or restrictions.

PIBI_LINK 2021 will showcase Kim’s stainless steel and brass furniture along with Chun’s new work, pictures of her old personal items, as well as her photographic interpretations of a part of Kim’s work process.

Kim, who has been doing metal work in diverse areas applying modern approaches in design and form while adhering to traditional methods to produce tableware to furniture, has been familiar with metal since childhood growing up under his metalworker father. Becoming a metal artist after graduating from Hanyang University as a metal design major, he proceeded to earn Craft Trend Fair’s the Artist of the Year award in 2013. His early works involved making various forms of tableware in metal, creating a new style of tools by designing in detail dishes or cutlery depending on their use and function.

Focusing particularly on the warm feeling given off by copper, Kim created his signature piece, the copper coffee dripper, utilizing the high heat conductivity of the metal and its sensitivity to the external environment. He also attempted to experiment with the practicality and aesthetic impression of metal as a substance by using iron, tin, silver, and brass to create various tableware items as art pieces. In addition, by using a relatively simple-functioned candlestick, as opposed to the highly functional eating utensils and dishes, he explored various forms of design that went beyond the general. Later, Kim expanded his field of small and meticulous metalwork to include furniture, stylishly conveying his language of form by using the size of things and metal broadly expressed within a space.

On the other hand, Chun brings to the two-dimensional plane three-dimensional spatiality or the relating narrative thereof. Focusing on the situation and the environment saturating the subject, she leads viewers to naturally notice, through her resulting work, the synesthetic imagery that lies beyond the forms seen on the superficial surface.

In her early days, the artist strived to build a world of senses through people with sensory deficits, such as the visually or hearing impaired, or those like poly artists and amateur astrologists who are especially sensitive to a single sense, such as sound or sight. By launching a fundamental question regarding the act of seeing, Chun has been recording, by way of photographs, the process of overcoming and expanding the imperfect world of the subject. Later, the artist became more focused on the medium of photography, following the theme of things observed from the borderline between life and death, or the state of movement and stillness.

In her Le repos incomplete (2017) series, she sought to capture the life embodied in seemingly static, inert objects through a story about the slab of material that becomes non-existent as the hands of the sculptor shape it, brought to completion with the senses of touch and sight. Following that, the artist has been profoundly addressing through diverse subject matters distinct narratives and the life and energy held by moments that have come into her perspective, as shown in the Epistolary (2018) series, a photographic record of static scenes she encountered during her trip to Vladivostok, Russia, taking in seasons as a spatial concept of sorts; the Floor (2018) series, where she captures through her lens the intensely nervous yet ambitious, aspiration-filled moments of gymnasts, right before the start of their routines; and You Must be Spring, a series about waiting in-progress, in which she has been taking scenic photographs of spring since 2014, the year of the tragic sinking of MV Sewol.

For this PIBI_LINK 2021, Chun captured a middle stage of Kim’s work process called the maquette with her camera. Before producing his actual piece, Kim first draws it and creates a maquette, a model, using a hardboard. It is the first step in a flat drawing being born into a three-dimensional structure. Unlike his finished work, this form outright reveals the substance material of the hardboard, which, through the lens of Chun’s camera, is returned to a leveled plane form to complete the formation of a new meaning. And through Chun’s two-dimensional reinterpretation of Kim’s three-dimensional progress stage, a temporal element of the flow of a process, though only momentarily, becomes enclosed in a photograph to demonstrate yet another kind of synesthesia. Chun photographed Kim’s work in process with the thought of “forms that solely touch the heart” in mind and inserted the artist’s name in the title in that context to express the connection between the two artists entirely.

PIBI_LINK 2021 will be significant in that the artists Chun and Kim will leave behind their distinctive work methods and exhibition formats to come together at PIBI GALLERY in a new joint venture that will surpass their past works.

PIBI GALLERY
125-6 Bukchon-ro, Jongno-gu, Seoul, Korea
+82 2 6263 2004

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